About Gina B. Nahai

For the professional stuff, see the official bio below. For the personal stuff, read my novels and you’ll get the family history, albeit fictionalized; or come to one of my talks and you’ll get a shorter version; I’m an Iranian Jew living in Los Angeles.

I taught fiction writing and publishing at USC for 16 years before the university shut down the program in 2016. I started out as an adjunct, thanks to poet James Ragan who hired me when I had only two books in print, but I soon graduated to full-time and would never subject myself to adjunct-hood again.

Official Bio:

Gina B. Nahai is a best-selling author and emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her novels have been translated into 18 languages and have been selected as “One of the Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. They have been finalists for the Orange Award, the IMPAC Award, and the Harold J. Ribalow Award. Nahai is the winner of the Los Angeles Arts Council Award, the Persian Heritage Foundation’s Award, the Simon Rockower Award, and the Phi Kappa Phi Award. Her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Magazine. She wrote a monthly column for the the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, for which she was twice a finalist for an L.A. Press Club award.

Nahai’s first novel, Cry of the Peacock (Crown, 1992), told, for the first time in any Western language, the 3,000-year story of the Jewish people of Iran. It won the Los Angeles Arts Council Award for fiction. Her second novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (Harcourt, 1999), was a finalist for the Orange Prize in England, the IMPAC award in Dublin, and the Harold J. Ribalow Award in the United States. A No. 1 L.A. Times bestseller, Moonlight was named as “One of the Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times. Her third novel, Sunday’s Silence (Harcourt, 2001), was also an Los Angeles Times bestseller and a “Best Book of the Year.” Her fourth novel, Caspian Rain – published in September 2007– was also an L.A. Times bestseller, was named “One of the Best Books of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune, and won the Persian Heritage Foundation’s Award. Her most recent novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., was nominated by Akashic Publishers for the Pulitzer Prize, was a finalist for the Jewish Book Council’s 2014 JJ Greenberg Memorial Award, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize.

Nahai is a frequent lecturer on the contemporary politics of the Middle East, has been a guest on PBS and CNBC, as well as a number of local television and radio news programs, and has guest-hosted on NPR affiliate KCRW (The Politics of Culture). A judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards (Fiction, First Fiction), she has lectured at a number of conferences nationwide and served on the boards of PEN Center USA West, The International Women’s Media Foundation, and B’nai Zion Western Region.

Nahai holds a B.A. and a master’s degree in international relations from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from USC. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.