SOURCE: Davar Ardalan

From Modeling in Suburban America to an Arranged Marriage in Iran: NPR Producer’s Personal Journey between Iran and America

Join Davar Ardalan Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. for an open debate about the journey of Ardalan’s life as discussed in her book, “My Name Is Iran” http://www.mynameisiran.com

Washington, D.C. -- January 31, 2007 -- At the age of eighteen, NPR Producer Davar Ardalan took a leap of faith. Homesick and suffering from the mounting pressures of a typical American adolescence and her parent’s divorce, she left the comfortable suburbs of Brookline, Massachusetts to return to revolutionary Iran.

Only a few years earlier, the country had undergone the chaos of the Islamic Revolution and women, especially faced strict religious pressure to abandon the Western values that had come to define the previously secular society.

Though she had witnessed the revolution’s unsettling beginnings in Iran, upon her return she made the decision to live as a devout Muslim. The suburban girl who had once modeled, emulating Brooke Shields in the famous Calvin Klein jeans ad, now donned a black chador and awaited an arranged marriage. Drawing on her remarkable family history and a family saga that sweeps back and forth between East and West, tradition and modernity, Ardalan reveals a country and a family inextricably linked to one another. “My Name Is Iran” is the story of how her family learned to navigate divergent cultures in a journey that would lead three generations of women from the United States to Iran and back again.

Publishers Weekly:

“Ardalan’s testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement.”

For the past fourteen years, Ardalan has been a producer for NPR News in Washington D.C. She has used her close watch on Iran to alert the network to important developments in that country. On Wednesday night, 6:30 p.m., January 31 at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C., Ardalan will be joined for discussion by best-selling Iranian memoirist Azar Nafisi of Reading Lolita in Tehran; a noted Iranian women’s rights activist, Mahnaz Afkhami; and NPR journalist Jacki Lyden.

Ardalan will hold book events in Washington D.C., Boston, New York, Albuquerque, Minneapolis and Richmond, VA.

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