Roya Hakakian

Writer and journalist Roya Hakakian works both in film and print. Her reportage has been featured on network television, including CBS's 60 Minutes and ABC documentary specials with the late Peter Jennings. Her opinions and essays have appeared in Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the weekend edition of NPR's "All Things Considered," and others. She blogs for World Affairs, for which she also serves as a member of the editorial board.

Hakakian is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. Her memoir, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2004 and Elle magazine's Best Nonfiction Book. It has been translated into several languages.

Hakakian is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction for her new book, The Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, about Tehran's terror campaign against exiled Iranians (Grove/Atlantic Press, September 2011). Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey calls it "a stunning parable of the central struggle of our times between totalitarianism and the rule of law."

Hakakian is a fellow at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center. She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and serves on the board of Refugees International. She speaks on the subject of the Middle East and human rights and has appeared on CSPAN-Book TV, CNN International, CBS Early Show, and Now with Bill Moyers.

Born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran, Roya Hakakian came to the United States in May 1985 on political asylum.