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BIOGRAPHY

Farideh Goldin is the author of Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman. Farideh was born in 1953 in Shiraz, Iran, to a family of dayanim, judges and leaders of the Jewish community. Farideh's family moved out of the mahaleh, the Jewish ghetto, to a Moslem neighborhood when she was eight years old. There, she experienced both friendship and anti-Semitism.  Later, attending an American-style university in Iran, she was torn between her loyalty to her family, who obeyed strict social, cultural and religious mores, and her western education that promoted individualism and self-reliance. Wedding Song reveals Farideh's struggle in balancing her two worlds. In her later essays, she confronts issues of identity as she searches for a place in American society as an Iranian immigrant.

FARIDEH'S FIRST GRADE PICTURE

Farideh met her husband shortly after her arrival in the U.S. After their three daughters were older, she returned to school to earn her graduate degree in Humanities and a certificate in Women's Studies in 1976 from Old Dominion University. A few years later, Farideh enrolled at the Creative Writing program to pursue her love of writing. She received her MFA in 1995.  In addition to her own stories which have been widely published, Farideh has shared her knowledge of Iranian Jews, Iranian Jewish life under Islam, Iranian Jewish women, their lives and literature with audiences in the U.S. and abroad.

SHIRAZ
Shiraz has been named the city of poets and roses. Sa'dee and Hafez are the two most famous Shirazi poets.

The population of Shiraz and the surrounding areas are believed to be around 1.2 million, of which about 2000 are Jewish.Iran has one of the oldest and largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, outside Israel. Iranian Jewish population was about 100,000 before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By some accounts about 30,000 Jews still live in Iran, mostly in its capital, Tehran.

AWARDS
Finalist at IVRI_NASAWI's (National Association of Sephardic Artists, Writers, Intellectuals)
Literary contest. May 1998.

First place for "Farsi Language: A Gender Neutral Language and Its Impact on Iranian Women Writers," and second place for "Many Faces of Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," Women's Studies Essay Contest, Old Dominion University, 1992 .

Nominated for Virginia Library Book Award, 2004.

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