Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Nayereh Doosti

Nayereh Doosti is a storyteller and translator from Shiraz, Bushehr, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2025 Steinbeck Fellowship,  the Epiphany Magazine Breakout 8 Writers Prize, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award, a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, a GrubStreet Literary Grant, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Bread Loaf Participant Scholarships for her fiction and translations, and a PEN Presents x Booker Prize Foundation Grant. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany Magazine, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and Nowruz Journal, among others. Her Persian translation of Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives was published by Goman Press in Tehran in spring 2024. She holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University and is currently working on a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley.