Dalia Sofer

Dalia Sofer was born in Iran and fled at the age of ten to the United States with her family. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been a resident at Yaddo. A graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, she lives in New York City.

Biography

Dalia Sofer was born in Iran and fled at the age of ten to the United States with her family. She received her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002 and has been a resident at Yaddo. In March 2007 she was the first recipient of the Sirenland Fellowship, given each year to an unpublished author to attend the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She has been a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered, Poets & Writers magazine, the National Poetry Almanac of the Academy of American Poets, and The New York Sun. Her essays, ""Of These, Solitude"" and ""A Prenuptial Visit to Chartres"" were included, respectively, in the anthologies Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press, 2001) and France, a Love Story (Seal Press, 2004). She lives in New York City.
Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

Good To Know

My first job was in retail in a clothing store on Madison Avenue. (It was the most ruthless job I've ever had, because I experienced, firsthand, the raw rudeness of people. Nowhere else can you find the sordid depths of the human soul than you can as a shop clerk on Madison Avenue!)

I like to take very long walks in the city - sometimes as long as seventy or eighty blocks. Walking shakes things up inside me. It is the best mood stabilizer.

I am fascinated by religious iconography. This began in Assisi, Italy, where I spent some time many years ago.