Laleh Khadivi, a northern CA-based writer and filmmaker born in Esfahan, Iran, received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Nobles Discover New Writers Award and an Emory Fiction Fellowship for her debut novel, The Age of Orphans. She has worked as a director, producer and cinematographer of documentary films since 1999, and her debut documentary, 900 WOMEN, aired on A&E and premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. She has written pieces for The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, VQR, and other publications, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a Pushcart Prize for her story Wanderlust.