Nastaran Kherad received her Master Degree in English and Comparative Literature, and her PhD in the Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently she is an Associate Professor, teaching Middle Eastern Studies and Persian Language and Culture. She was born in Abadan, a city in southern Iran, near the Persian Gulf. At age two, after her father’s sudden death, she moved to Shiraz to live with her maternal grandmother, Bibi. Unfortunately, her teenage years took a quick turn by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and due to the political pressure on her and her family, she had to leave Iran and embark a tumultuous journey which would take her first to Germany and later to the United States, where she settled in California!