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Aria Aber

Biography

Aria Aber

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, HARD DAMAGE, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Creative Writing and divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

Aria Aber

Books by Aria Aber

Good Girl
by Aria Aber - Fiction, Women's Fiction

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the 20th century, 19-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany --- and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?