Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing
Assistant Professor, MFA Program in Creative Writing; Founder, Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance; Fellow, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies; Fellow, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
English

Research Interests

Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing; Literatures of Exile and Resistance; Memory Studies; Space Studies; Middle Eastern Literature; Latin American and Iberian Literature; American Literature; Postcolonial Theory; Ethics and Aesthetics of the Novel.

Related Courses Taught

Reading the Body Politic; Walking Writing Thinking

Biography

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from ART OMI and has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Her work has been translated into half a dozen languages. She is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a bi-annual symposium and lecture series that focuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations.

Her novel SAVAGE TONGUES is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in August, 2021. Her novella N., based on Napoleon’s exile in Elba, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2022 as part of their Spatial Species Series.

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