Michael Craig Hillmann

Baltimore-born author Michael Craig Hillmann first travelled to Iran as an American Peace Corps Volunteer in 1965, his assignment to teach English language and literature at the Faculty of Letters at Mashhad University. He met his wife Sorayya there. They married in 1967. He thereafter studied Persian, Arabic, and Islam at The University of Chicago and Tehran University. His daughter Elizabeth was born in Tehran in 1970. Since 1974 he has taught Persian literature and Iranian culture at The University of Texas at Austin. He writes on medieval Persian epic and lyric verse, twentieth-century Persian fiction and lyric poetry, Persian carpets, and Iranian painting.