Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author, most recently, of the story collection, AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. His memoir, WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE, was selected as one of the 10 best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his story collection, BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENEMY, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize.

His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Short Stories, Granta and McSweeney's, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship

Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and he leads the Creative Nonfiction track in Hunter's MFA program. He also teaches creative writing at Columbia University and New York University, where he received an outstanding teaching award.

Books by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

American Estrangement: Stories

by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - Fiction, Short Stories

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories --- some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories --- is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles --- a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction --- even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political and racial forces of American society.