NILOFAR SHIDMEHR is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of Between Lives and Shirin and Salt Man, a finalist for a B.C. Book Prize. Her short stories have been published in Room, The New Quarterly, and Ava-ye-Tabiid (The Voice of Exile). She has published several books in her mother tongue, including a Farsi translation (with Ali Azarang) of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, and a wide range of essays on women’s rights, migration and diaspora, and social and political issues in Iran. As a member of the Iranian women’s movement, she presented lectures at the Iranian Women Studies Foundation Conference and at the Iranian Women Activists’ Organizations annual seminars in Germany. She holds a B.A. (Double Honours) in Philosophy and Creative Writing, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education. Dr. Shidmehr is one of the pioneers of poetic inquiry as a methodology of research and a specialist in literature and cinema of modern Iran. She teaches Liberal Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives with her husband.