An Evening with Moniro Ravanipour & Maryam Ala Amjadi

By 2020, it had been 14 years since the renowned Iranian author Moniro Ravanipour left Iran, in part to escape persecution for her writing. On January 8 of that year, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a flight en route from Tehran to Kyiv. There were no survivors. Family members of those lost in the tragedy turned to Ravanipour for help, hoping she could teach them to write memoirs of their loved ones. The result was the book I Will Call You Once I Arrive in Kyiv. Join BMI for a conversation between Ravanipour, a former BMI City of Asylum Fellow (2007-2010), and current City of Asylum Fellow Maryam Ala Amjadi about the book, how it was created, and what that process means for Ravanipour as a prolific writer and teacher.

Moniro Ravanipour is an internationally acclaimed Iranian-American writer of short stories, novels, children’s literature, screenplays, and memoir. Raised in Iran, Ravanipour faced educational restrictions, persecution, and imprisonment in the years following the country’s cultural revolution in 1979, experiences which have informed Ravanipour’s writing and activism. She has read and lectured internationally, including throughout the United States, where she has been a fellow at Brown University and also at UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. Her book I’ll Call You When I Arrive in Kyiv is especially unique: the book details her work with those who lost loved ones aboard Flight PS752, shot down by the Islamic Military Guard in 2020 shortly after takeoff from Tehran. The surviving family members asked Ravanipour to help coach them in writing memoirs about those lost, which she did from the United States through virtual sessions and workshops.

Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. She won the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Prize in the inaugural Yinchuan International Poetry Festival in China and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her short story “The Ice Seller of Hell” won the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Award and will be published in the Meridians journal (Duke University Press). Ala Amjadi was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page dedicated to the socio-cultural nuances of Iran. In 2017, she earned a joint PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from Kent (UK) and Porto (Portugal) universities. Her poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally, and her poetry has been translated into multiple languages, including Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. Her latest book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems) was published by Poetrywala in 2022.

Host or Publisher Black Mountain Institute