Haleh Liza Gafori

Haleh Liza Gafori, is an Iranian American translator, poet, performance artist, and composer born in New York City. Her book Gold, which features her translations of poems by the thirteenth-century sage and mystic Rumi, was published by New York Review Books Classics/Penguin Random House in 2022, followed by Water (New York Review Books Classics, 2025), which expands on the previous collection of translations. She has also been published in Harvard Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Hyperallergic, and The Marginalian. One of her poems was anthologized in Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Columbia University Press, 2015), edited by Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott.

A 2024 MacDowell Fellow, Gafori also received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) in 2023 and, with their support, developed a cross-media performance piece weaving translations from Gold with original text, anecdotes, and musical compositions that she sings in Persian. The piece debuted at the New York Public Library for World Heritage Month. 

Gafori performs, lectures, and leads workshops at universities and festivals across the United States and abroad, including Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, Swarthmore College, Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge (LPR), the New York Public Library, the Women’s Library and Information Center Foundation (WLICF) in Istanbul, and Bradford Literary Fest.