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10 influential authors who came to the US as immigrants

These 10 immigrant authors have all made significant contributions to US literature and culture.

7. Azar Nafisi

Born in Iran in the mid-1950s, Azar Nafisi has said that she initially welcomed the 1979 Iranian Revolution, hoping that it would lead to a new Iran – one that supported freedom of expression. But her feelings changed as the Iranian leaders instituted Shari'a law and tightened their grip on the country. Nafisi taught English literature at Tehran University, but eventually said that she felt unable to continue due to constant scrutiny from other faculty members and students. She emigrated to the US in 1997. In 2003, Nafisi published her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," which documents her life in Tehran after leaving the university and choosing to teach seven young women in her own home every Thursday. "Lolita in Tehran" was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years.

Nafisi remains a very vocal advocate for Iranian culture, which she says that she feels has been corrupted and repressed since 1979.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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