Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose memoir excerpt, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected by Robert Atwan as a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series. His poems have been anthologized in Woman, Life, Freedom (Guernica Editions), Odes to Our Undoing (Risk Press), and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). He was recently a runner-up in the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.

He has won the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize for “At Home in Avonlea” (selected by Jenny Heijun Wills) and the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize for “Dear God,” praised by judge Beth Ann Fennelly for its “tense and tender evocation” of life in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War. Saadlou’s essay, “The Enemy,” received the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine Awards in Canada. Final judge Daniel Allen Cox called it “a heart-wrenching story, with a narrative tension that holds you from the start and never lets go.”

He has received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as well as a writing fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. His stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, American Literary Review, and Southeast Review, among many other journals. He has also won the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation and earned an honorable mention for the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for Best Poetry in Translation.