Haleh Liza Gafori

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has maintained and deepened her connection through singing and translating the poetry of various Persian poets for well over a decade. Gafori received her BS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and her MFA in creative writing from CCNY where she completed a thesis of original poems as well as translations of the Persian poets such as Sohrap Sepehri and Omran Salahi, for which she received an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Goodman Grant for Poetry. For the poetry journal Rattapallax, Gafori served as a guest editor for a section on New Persian Poetry. Gafori’s own poems have been published by Columbia University Press and Rattapallax.