Women Writing About Women: Dalia Sofer

Release date: March 26, 2008 |

Dalia Sofer, the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Septembers of Shiraz, will hold a free public reading in Goucher College’s Alumnae/i House at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, as part of the 24th Annual Women Writing About Women Symposium. A student reading featuring Women Writing About Women contest winners will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the campus’s Heubeck Multipurpose Room before Sofer’s reading.

Sofer was born in Tehran, Iran, where she lived until age 10. After spending time in Israel, she arrived in New York, where she attended the Lycée Français de New York, and later, New York University. Sofer went on to earn an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Her début novel, the partly autobiographical The Septembers of Shiraz, is set in Tehran after the 1979 revolution and describes the journey — both psychological and physical — of a Jewish family whose father is imprisoned in the first years of revolutionary Iran. The novel exposes the trauma that occurs to individuals when there are huge political shifts — from the father’s experience in prison to his 10-year-old daughter’s participation in a birthday party.

The New York Times called the novel “miraculously light in its touch, as beautiful and delicate as a book about suffering can be,” and Christian Science Monitor deemed it a “powerful story honestly told.”

Sofer is a freelance writer and regularly contributes to NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Poets & Writers magazine, the National Poetry Almanac of the Academy of American Poets, and The New York Sun. She was a recipient of the 2007 Whiting Writers’ Awards, which provides individual grants of $50,000 to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise.

Sponsored by Goucher College’s Women’s Studies Program, as well as the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, the Women Writing About Women Symposium honors talented female student writers from high schools throughout Maryland.