Mojgan Ghazirad: THE HOUSE ON SUN STREET (In Conversation With Lauren Cerand)

About the Panelists:

• Mojgan Ghazirad, Mojgan Ghazirad, a native of Iran, graduated from Tehran University of Medical Sciences with a medical degree. She studied pediatrics at Inova Children’s Hospital and received her neonatal medicine specialty from George Washington University. She currently works as an assistant professor of pediatrics at George Washington University NICU in Washington, DC. She has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe: A Lover in White Jacket in 2012 in Iran, Turquoise Dream in 2014 in Germany, and her last collection In the Solitude of Suitcases in 2016 in the UK. Her English essays have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2020, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Idaho Review, Longreads, The Common, etc. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

• Lauren Cerand, Lauren Cerand, after two decades in New York and a year in Italy, now lives in Baltimore. Essays that she wrote while living in Florence during the first lockdown in Italy were shortlisted for the Garden Museum in London’s 2020 Mollie Salisbury Cup Memoir Writing Competition, and commissioned for Dining in Place. Her 2021 eulogy for Tyrant Books founder Giancarlo DiTrapano was published in Lit Hub and reprinted in the Spring 2021 issue of Northwest Review. In September 2022, her writing was included in SPEECH ITSELF, a Jenny Holzer installation at Rockefeller Center. She volunteers as an advisor to Film Forum in New York, the international literary magazine Off Assignment, and The Foxie G Foundation in Maryland, which, through rescue, rehabilitation, adoption and permanent retirement programs, provides a future for horses facing uncertainty.