Persis Karim

Persis Karim is an Iranian-American writer, poet, and professor at San Francisco State University. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the daughter of an Iranian father who came here in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s military occupation by British and Soviet troops during World War II. She came of age during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and felt a deep concern for how Iran was represented in the media, defying what she experienced in her family and the larger community of Iranian Americans. She has been engaged with the Iranian diaspora community here for more than 30 years in her capacity as a professor, first at San Jose State University, where she founded the Persian Studies program, and then currently as the Director for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. She has written extensively on the culture and literature of Iranian Americans and is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999); Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006); and, Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers (2013). She also piloted a digital archive of Bay Area Iranian Americans on the DIVA site at SF State as well as did a digital storytelling Karim has worked actively to support and help build the Iranian diaspora community in the Bay Area—largely through her literary and cultural activism. She has watched over three decades from the seat of observer-participant as this community has evolved and grown, welcoming younger generations into it.

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