Said sayrafiezadeh

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a...

In many ways I'm similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the...

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of...

It's very difficult for me to look at politics with clear eyes. I'll read a story in the paper and the first thing that pops into my head is, what would my dad say about that? Then I try to break out...

My characters are not underachievers; they aspire to great things, but they are limited by the world around them.

Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating...

I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.

I need to feel as if everything is clean and in its proper place before I can even attempt to write one word. At least, that's what I tell myself. I make the bed, I put away the dishes, maybe I dust,...

I work in the most non-Communist job. I work for 'Martha Stewart Living.'

I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average...