Sholeh Wolpé

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born American poet, playwright, and literary translator. Wolpé’s literary work includes 11 books of poetry, anthologies, and translations as well as several plays, an oratorio, song lyrics, and an original screenplay. Wolpé’s memoir in verse, Abacus of Loss (2022), was hailed by Ilya Kaminsky as a book “that created its own genre—a thrill of lyric combined with the narrative spell.” Wolpé’s other poetry collections are Cómo Escribir Una Canción De Amor (2017), Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (2013), Rooftops of Tehran (2008) and The Scar Saloon (2004). 

Wolpé’s translation of The Conference of the Birds (2017) by the 12th-century Iranian Sufi mystic poet Attar received the PEN Heim Translation Grant. Her translations of the Iranian rebel poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s selected work, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007), was awarded the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award in 2010.

Wolpé wrote the libretto for The Conference of the Birds—An Oratorio, composed by Fahad Siadat and choreographed by André Megerdichian, which premiered at the BroadStage in June 2022. Wolpé has also collaborated with international composers and musicians, including Huba De Graaff, Aida Shirazi, Sahba Motallebi, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Sahba Aminikia, Shawn Crouch, San Gabriel Seven  and Mamak Khadem, among others.

Her plays have been produced by Oakland Theater Project, Inferno Theatre, Northern Illinois University, and The Alternative Theater Company, among others, and have been finalists and semifinalists at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Centenary Stage Women Playwrights, Ojai Playwrights Festival, and Ashland New Plays Festival. Her play SHAME is featured in an anthology from the UK, New Iranian Plays (2022).

Wolpé's 2012 anthology, The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles, received the 2013 Midwest Book Award. Other anthologies include Breaking the Jaws of Silence (2013). She is a regional editor of Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, edited by Reza Aslan, and her Iran Edition of the Atlanta Review became that journal’s best-selling issue. She travels internationally as a performing poet, writer and public speaker. Wolpé was named a 2020 Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is presently a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine.