Azar Nafisi
Best-selling author Azar Nafisi, a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University, won a fellowship from Oxford and taught English literature at several universities in Iran. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for America in 1997. Her most recent book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2004), is the courageous and moving story of how she and her resilient young students managed to escape the harsh constraints of their daily lives through the literature they read together every week. Dr. Nafisi has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic and has appeared frequently on radio and television programs. She lives in Washington, D.C.
