Excited to share that my latest article, “Public Reforms, Private Struggles: The Poetry and Activism of Malakah-i Etezadi,” is now live as part of the Women Poets Iranica project.
This essay offers an analysis of the literary and political life of Malakah-i Etezadi—poet, prose writer, and women’s rights advocate. It delves into her critical poetry and memoirs, situating her work within broader discourses on gender and reform during the Pahlavi era.
You can read it here:
An engaging discussion about The Wonder of the World, a bilingual edition that highlights the only known Iranian travel account of 19th-century America, edited and introduced by Ali Ferdowsi.
Featured Speaker: Ali Ferdowsi – Editor of The Wonder of the World; Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science, Notre Dame de Namur University
In Conversation With: Mahdi Ganjavi – Book Review Editor, MELA Notes; Lecturer, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; author of the MELA Notes review of the book
Where Words Defeat Bullets (Compiled by Mansour Noorbakhsh, Asemana Books, 2026) is not simply an anthology of solidarity; it is an experiment in global poetic witnessing. Emerging from a Toronto-based gathering yet extending across continents and histories, the collection positions poetry as both an archive of the Iranian 2026 uprising and a medium through which that history becomes legible beyond national and linguistic borders. What distinguishes this volume is not only its political urgency, but its insistence that Iran’s struggle is already embedded in a global poetics of resistance.
To read more:
https://asemanamagazine.substack.com/p/global-poetics-as-archive-memory
Fereshteh Molavi’s Stories from Tehran: The refusal to forget; published in Asemana Magazine.
Mahdi Ganjavi reflects on Molavi’s uncompromising vision and the decades of artistic, political, and diasporic commitment behind her fearless writing.
Read more: https://asemanamagazine.substack.com/…/fereshteh…
It is a pleasure to write that my entry on ʿAbd al-Ḥosayn Ṣanʿatīzādeh Kermānī has been published in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Ten years ago, during my last opportunity to speak with the late Professor Yarshater, he invited me to write the entry on ʿAbd al-Ḥosayn Ṣanʿatīzādeh, a pioneer of Persian science fiction, utopian, and historical novels, at a time when Hoorā Yāvarī was the editor of the literature section of the Encyclopaedia Iranica.
This was a commitment I felt deeply responsible for, yet with Dr. Yarshater’s passing and the temporary pause in Iranica’s activities, it was delayed for a decade. I am now pleased that, with the resumption of Iranica’s work under the direction of Dr. Touraj Daryaee, and through the efforts of Mateo Farzaneh and Laetitia Nanquette, this entry has finally been completed and published.
It is both a fulfillment of my obligation to Dr. Yarshater’s invitation and a concise scholarly account of a writer whose works I have spent years editing (with the collaboration of Ideh) and historically recovering.
To read the entry:
Ganjavi, Mahdi. “SAN‘ATIZADEH KERMANI, ‘ABD-AL-HOSAYN.” Encyclopaedia Iranica
First published in 1941 during the Allied occupation of Iran, this groundbreaking novel by San‘atizadeh is a pioneering work of Persian science fiction and arguably one of the earliest feminist utopian narratives in modern Iranian literature. Set against the backdrop of global conflict and upheaval, the novel boldly imagines the rise of a visionary female protagonist to world leadership. With its audacious exploration of gender, power, and technological progress, San‘atizadeh’s work defied the literary and political conventions of its time. Long forgotten and overlooked, the novel has now been revived in this critical edition, introduced and edited by Mahdi Ganjavi and Mehrnaz Mansouri. Their editorial and scholarly work has brought long-overdue recognition to this remarkable and prescient text, positioning it at the intersection of speculative fiction, feminist thought, and anti-colonial imagination.
To purchase the book click here.
In The Beginning, There Was Translation
Hopscotch (Falschrum Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024) is a collection of 13 poems in Persian by Fatemeh Shams, accompanied by their English translations by Armen Davoudian, and a series of evocative photographs by Stefan Maneval. This collection delves deeply into the themes of exile, memory, and the internal relation between writing and translation. Shams’s work is a moving reflection on the nature of displacement and the continuous search for meaning through language.
A poem by Mahdi Ganjavi in honor of Khodanur Lojei
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2023-01/woman-life-freedom-khodanur-mahdi-ganjavi/
Published as an e-book, Incubus, ( بختك-“Bakhtak“in Farsi) is a collection of fifty seven horror, at times blunt, stories written in Farsi by different Iranian writers, living inside and outside Iran.
Read more:
https://iranianstoday.com/anthology-of-short-story-by-iranian-diaspora/
