VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
KHAKPOUR: A man proposed to me after a reading last year! He kept insisting he was serious! I declined.
Porochista Khakpour is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and professor. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir SICK (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels THE LAST ILLUSION (Bloomsbury, 2014)—a 2014 “Best Book of the Year” according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and more—and SONS AND OTHER FLAMMABLE OBJECTS (Grove, 2007)—the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction,” one of the Chicago Tribune’s “Fall’s Best,” and a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” She has had fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, Ucross, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Northwestern University, the University of Leipzig, and many others. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Slate, Salon, Spin, The Daily Beast, Elle, and many other publications around the world. She is currently Contributing Editor at The Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Writer in Residence at Bard College. Born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in New York City.
Come see Porochista read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, June 12 at 7:30pm.