Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of THE BOHEMIANS, a novel that imagines the friendship between photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese American assistant in 1920s San Francisco. Her debut novel, SONG OF A CAPTIVE BIRD, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” book and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Darznik is also the author of THE GOOD DAUGHTER: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among others.

Darznik was born in Iran and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a J.D. from the University of California, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Books by Jasmin Darznik

The Bohemians

by Jasmin Darznik - Fiction, Historical Fiction

A young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer --- and a naïve one at that --- Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art and politics. She also finds herself falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened, and she grows into the artist whose iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation.

The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

by Jasmin Darznik - Nonfiction

Jasmin Darznik tells the shocking story of how her mother’s secret, traumatizing past in Iran was suddenly revealed to her in her early 20s.