MONIRO RAVANIPOUR
Country of origin: Iran
City of Refuge: Las Vegas, Nevada
July 2007 - present

Moniro Ravanipour has published eight books in Iran, and translations of her work have also appeared in the West. Her story, Satan’s Stones, was selected for the ground-breaking anthology of Iranian literature, Strange Times, My Dear. Among her novels are The Drowned, Heart of Steel, and Gypsy by Fire. Ms. Ravanipour is a member of the Association of Iranian Writers and has been invited to give readings in Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. From January to June 2007, she was a visiting fellow in the International Writers Program at Brown University's Watson Institute.

In recent years, her work has elicited attention by Iran's government. In late 2006, police stripped all copies of her current work from bookstores countrywide. Prior to this episode, Satan’s Stones, among other work, had been banned in Iran. Two more novels are currently under review by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

For more information, click here.

FORMER WRITERS IN RESIDENCE

REZA DANESHVAR
Country of origin: Iran
City of Asylum: Ithaca, New York
2003 - June 2006

Born in 1948 in Machan, Iran, Reza Daneshvar studied Persian literature at both Machan and Tehran Universities before beginning a career teaching theater studies in Machan. He went on to become the head of the theater program in Khorassan province, and at the time of the revolution he was vice president of the School of Arts in Machad. In 1979 he was imprisoned for a year for his novel Prayer For the Dead, about the taboo subject of the 1953 coup that brought the Shah of Iran to power. Mr. Daneshvar was forced to leave Iran in 1982. He lived and worked in Paris before becoming Ithaca's second writer-in-residence.

Following his tenure at Ithaca City of Asylum, Mr. Daneshvar was selected to be Writer In Residence at the Virgina Center for the Creative Arts. To learn more, click here.

ER TAI GAO
Country of origin: China
City of Refuge: Las Vegas
February 2003 - June 2006

Writer, critic, and painter Er Tai Gao was born in 1935 near Nanjing, China. A former member of the Council of the National Association of Art and Literary Theory, he is widely known in China for his contributions to aesthetic theory. In 1957, he published an essay, On Beauty, that challenged the prevailing Communist stance on aesthetics and objectivity. Mr. Gao was quickly branded a "rightist" and sentenced to three years of hard labor in the Gobi desert, where nearly three-quarters of his fellow prisoners died.

Over the next forty years, as the Cultural Revolution overtook China and ensuing campaigns toward "eradicating spiritual pollution" rose in its wake, Mr. Gao's strong humanist views, which he expressed through his writing and teaching, made him a target of the Chinese government. He was sentenced again to hard labor from 1966 to 1972, and later dismissed from his duties at Lanzhou University and prohibited from writing and publishing. He was arrested in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square protests and, after spending nearly a year in prison, was again prohibited from teaching and publishing. In 1992, he and his wife, the painter Maya Gao, escaped to Hong Kong and eventually settled in the United States.

His published works include The Struggle of Beauty and Beauty, The Symbol of Freedom. His memoir, Searching for Home, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

To read Ertai Gao's Sunset Over Barren Mountains on Words Without Borders online, click here.

SYL CHENEY-COKER
Country of origin: Sierra Leone
City of Refuge: Las Vegas, Nevada
October 2000 - January 2003

Poet and novelist Syl Cheney-Coker was born in Freetown and educated at the Universities of Oregon and Wisconsin. He has written extensively about the condition of exile and the view of Africa from an African abroad, and his work has been translated into ten languages. Among his novels is The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which was a finalist for the coveted British Commonwealth Prize. Formerly a fellow at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, from 2005 to 2006 he was the Lion Feuchtwanger Fellow at the Villa-Aurora Foundation for European-American Relations in California.

In the early 1990s, after living abroad for over a decade, he returned to Freetown to become editor of a progressive newspaper, The Vanguard. After the military coup of 1997, he was targeted as a dissident and barely escaped with his life. Mr. Cheney-Coker decided to return to a somewhat more stable Sierra Leone in 2003, noting that "after a while, exile is neither justifiable nor tolerable."

To locate books by Syl Cheney-Coker at a local bookstore, click here.

YI PING
Country of origin: China
City of Asylum: Ithaca, New York
September 2001 - June 2003

A playwright, essayist, fiction writer and poet, Yi Ping taught for years at a university in Beijing. Because of his pro-democracy activism, he was "relieved" of his job soon after the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Forbidden to teach or publish, and with his previously published books slated for purging, he went into exile.

After a few difficult years, at first in Poland and then in the United States, he was invited to Ithaca through the auspices of the Paris-based International Parliament of Writers, the original organization which found communities that offer asylum and sponsorship to writers needing protection and assistance.

To read more about Yi Ping, click here.

HUANG XIANG
Country of origin: China
City of Asylum: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
November 2004 - September 2007

Writer and painter Huang Xiang is considered to be the pre-eminent post-cultural revolution poet of China. Born in Hunan Province in 1941, his unceasing bravery, in the face of sure re-imprisonment, and further torture, forced him to leave his homeland. He has been in exile in the United States since 1997.

Mr. Huang began writing poems in the 1950s and has been imprisoned repeatedly for his work. In 1978, he founded Enlightenment, the first underground writers’ society, and started a literary magazine with the same title. A prolific poet, essayist and painter, his most recent publication is a bilingual selection, Out of Communist China.

For more information on Huang Xiang, click here.