Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh was born in Brooklyn in 1968 to an Iranian father and a Jewish American mother. He grew up in Pittsburgh. He is an award-winning fiction writer, memoirist and playwright. He is the recipient of a 2012-2013 fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, for which he received a Whiting Writers’ Award. It was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. His fiction debut,Brief Encounters with the Enemy, will be published by The Dial Press this coming August. Saïd lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at New York University.