Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
She has lectured and written extensively on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran.
Azar Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem" published in The New Republic has been reprinted into several languages. She is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels.
She is currently working on two books, one tentatively titled The Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples, and the other, Things I Have Been Silent About, about culture, history, and loss.
Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon's most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; it has received 14 additional national awards and is published in 24 languages. Mr. Solomon is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and has lectured on depression around the world. He is a contributing editor at Travel and Leisure, and writes for The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. He is currently working on a book entitled, Far from the Tree: A Legacy of Love, in which he studies family dynamics and extraordinary children; he is also working on a PhD at Cambridge University. He serves on numerous philanthropic boards in the fields of mental health, the arts, and gay rights, and is a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and the New York Institute for the Humanities.
