Sholeh Wolpé


Sholeh Wolpé is an award-winning Iranian-American poet, playwright, and literary translator and.
She was born in Iran, and has lived in Trinidad, England and United States.

Biography

Sholeh Wolpé was born in Tehran, Iran, and spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. The Poetry Foundation has written that “Wolpé’s concise, unflinching, and often wry free verse explores violence, culture, and gender. So many of Wolpé’s poems deal with the violent situation in the Middle East, yet she is ready to both bravely and playfully refuse to let death be too proud.”
Wolpe's literary translations have garnered several prestigious awards. She lives in Los Angeles.

Literary career

A recipient of 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, 2014 Hedgebrook Residency, the 2013 Midwest Book Award, and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, Wolpé literary work includes five collections of poetry, four books of translations, three anthologies and several plays.
Her play The Conference of the Birds is an adaptation of 12th Century Sufi mystic Attar's epic poem. Her play SHAME was a 2016 Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwright conference semifinalist, and she was one of ten Centenary Stage Women Playwrights Series finalists in 2016.
Wolpé’s first collection, The Scar Saloon, was lauded by Billy Collins as “poems that cast a light on some of what we all hold in common.” Poet and novelist Chris Abani called the poems "political, satirical, and unflinching in the face of war, tyranny and loss... they transmute experience into the magic of the imagined."
The poems in Wolpé’s second collection, Rooftops of Tehran, were called by poet Nathalie Handal “as vibrant as they are brave,” and Richard Katrovas wrote that its publication was a “truly rare event: an important book of poetry.”
Wolpé’s translations of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s selected work, Sin, was awarded the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award in 2010. The judges wrote that they “found themselves experiencing Forugh’s Persian poems with new eyes.” Alicia Ostriker praised the translations as “hypnotic in their beauty and force.” Willis Barnstone found them “extravagantly majestic,” and of such order that “they resurrect Forugh.”
Sholeh Wolpé and Mohsen Emadi’s translations of Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" were commissioned by the University of Iowa’s International Program. They are currently on University of Iowa’s Whitman website and will be available in print in Iran.
Robert Olen Butler lauded Wolpé's anthology, Breaking the Jaws of Silence as “a deeply humane and aesthetically exhilarating collection.” Wolpé's 2012 anthology,The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles, a recipient of the 2013 Midwest Book Award, includes many of Wolpé’s own translations, and was called by American poet Sam Hamil a “most welcome gift” that “embraces and illuminates our deepest human bonds and hopes.”
Wolpé’s Iran Edition of the Atlanta Review became that journal’s best-selling issue. Wolpé is also a regional editor of Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from The Modern Middle East, and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Wolpé’s modern translation of The Conference of the Birds by the 12th Century Iranian Sufi mystic poet "Attar", was lauded by PEN lauded as an “artful and exquisite modern translation.” About the book, W.W. Norton & Co writes: "Wolpé re-creates the intense beauty of the original Persian in contemporary English verse and poetic prose, fully capturing for the first time the beauty and timeless wisdom of Attar’s masterpiece for modern readers."
Wolpe's poems and translations have been set to music by American composer Shawn Crouch, Iranian composers Niloufar Nourbakhsh, and Sahba Aminikia and Australian composer Brook Rees and Iranian vocalist and musicians Mamak Khadem, , and Sussan Deyhim.. She has written lyrics for American jazz band San Gabriel 7.

Education

Wolpe's work can be found in the following anthologies: