Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a memoirist, fiction writer and playwright. He is the author of the story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times.
His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His play, Autobiography of a Terrorist, was recently produced by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco.
Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a Visiting Scholar at Wesleyan University, and teaches creative writing at Hunter College, Columbia University and New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
Photo credit: Basso Cannarsa
