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Mehdi Tavana Okasi

Associate Professor of Creative Writing

Juanita and Joseph Leff Distinguished Professor 2024-2026

Mehdi Tavana Okasi’s work has appeared in Granta, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, Catapult, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and anthologies like My Shadow Is My Skin, Best New American Voices 2009, &Tremors: New Fiction from Iranian-American Writers, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Society of Arts & Letters, & The Joyce Horton Jonson Fellowship at the Key West Literary Seminars. He was the 2011-12 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was named a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fiction Fellow. He has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, The Studios of Key West, and the James Merrill House, among others. 

More About Me

He was born in Iran and along with his mother and younger brother, became a refugee of the Iran-Iraq war. He grew up in the suburbs of Boston and is currently completing a novel, May This Be Your Last Sorrow.