The Green Sea of Heaven

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet and translator whose selection of poems by Iran's iconic female poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022) was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her own books of poetry include Salient (New Directions, 2020). She serves on the boards of The Beloit Poetry Journal, Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, and from 2009-2015 served as chair of the board of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in New York City. www.etgrayjr.com.

Iraj Anvar is an actor, singer, stage and film director, writer, translator, and educator. He completed his first diploma in Genoa, Italy at the Swiss School, then gained a degree in acting and directing at Alessandro Fersen's Studio di Arti Sceniche in Rome, Italy. On returning to his native Tehran, he co-founded the Tehran Theater Workshop where he directed and performed in many stage and television productions and translated plays and film dialogue into Persian, including European plays he directed for the stage. He also taught acting and diction at Tehran University. A few months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he moved to New York City, where he received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU where he taught Persian language and literature for several years. In New York, he has read and sung Rumi, Hafiz, and other classical poets in Persian and in his own translations at the Asia Society, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Bartholomew's Church, the Long House Preserve Garden, the Bowery Poetry Club, Stony Brook, and several other institutions.