Iranian poet Pegah Ahmadi has been named recipient of Brown’s 2011–12 International Writers Project Fellowship. The fellowship provides a stipend and working space to writers who have been subjected to political harassment, imprisonment, or death threats in their homelands. Ahmadi was born in Tehran in 1974. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, On the Ending G, Cadence, and These Days of Mine Are A Throat. She was banned from publishing poetry in her home country, except in a limited manner through online venues run by exiled Iranian writers. In 2009, following her involvement in the Green Movement’s demonstrations against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ahmadi was threatened with imprisonment. She left Iran with the assistance of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), which placed her as a guest writer in the city-of-refuge site in Frankfurt, Germany. During her years in Frankfurt her long unpublished book, I Was Not Cold, translated into German by Jutta Himmelreich, was published by Sujet Verlag in Berlin. Ahmadi will be in residence at Brown for the 2011-12 academic year. The International Writers Project Fellowship is jointly sponsored by Brown’s Department of Literary Arts.

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