Mandana Zandian

Mandana Zandian is an Iranian-American poet, journal-ist, and physician, and all these aspects of her life seem to have played a part in the character of the poetic universe she has created over the past fifteen years.
Born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1972, Mandana Zandian went through her education in her homeland, graduating from Shahid Beheshti University’s School of Medicine in 1997. She has lived through the tumult and various tribulations of Iran’s recent history, the revolution and the violence it ushered in as well as the devastating war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, have colored her childhood, while an incomplete and badly thwarted reform movement has left an indelible mark on her youthful psyche. In 2000 she and her husband moved to the United States. Meanwhile, poetry was gaining ground steadily in her imagination, and the first two collections of her poems, Blue Gaze (2002) and The Labyrinth of Silence (2004) were published in Iran. Beginning in 2006, the journalist Iraj Gorgin detected and nurtured the talent in the young woman as a public intellectual, one in the use of the Persian language and the art of the interview. Over the past seven years or so, she has produced two books primarily based on conversations and conducted numerous in-depth interviews with various luminaries among Iranians in exile. In more recent years, through the art of radio interviews, she has further extended her reach into the life and work of Iranian and Persian-speaking poets like herself all over the world, as well as in her home country of Iran.