Farzana Marie | |
---|---|
Born | Felisa Hervey California |
Alma mater | United States Air Force Academy, University of Arizona |
Occupation(s) | Military veteran, writer, poet, translator |
Employer | United States Air Force |
Awards | Bronze Star Medal |
Farzana Marie (born 1983or1984) is the pen name of Felisa Hervey, an American poet, author and former United States Air Force officer.
Hervey was born in California [1] to Episcopal Church missionary parents, Debbie and John Hervey. [2] Felisa and her five siblings lived with their parents in Chile and Kazakhstan before returning to their native California [2] when she was 15. [1]
Hervey joined the United States Air Force Academy in June 2001. [2] Before graduating, she travelled to Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 to work in an orphanage and learn Dari. [2] [3] After graduation and joining the US Air Force, she spent two years working in Kabul where her fluency in Dari enabled community relations work. [2]
She received a Bronze Star Medal in 2012, the same year her six-year deployment to Afghanistan ended. [2] After her military career, Hervey returned to Kabul to study and later to work for NATO. [4] She worked as an editor and translator, using the pen name Farzana Marie. [2]
Hervey studied for a PhD in Persian literature at the University of Arizona, funded by a Pat Tillman Foundation scholarship. [2] In August 2015, before her PhD was complete, she suffered a stroke in Afghanistan. [4] Aphasia caused her to lose all six languages that she spoke. [4] In May 2019, she graduated her Ph.D in Middle Eastern literature. [1]
Hervey was aged 30 in 2014, and is Christian. [2]
Persian literature comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Turkey, regions of Central Asia and South Asia where the Persian language has historically been either the native or official language. For example, Rumi, one of the best-loved Persian poets, born in Balkh or Wakhsh, wrote in Persian and lived in Konya, at that time the capital of the Seljuks in Anatolia. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature from Iran, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan, the wider Caucasus, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia. Not all Persian literature is written in Persian, as some consider works written by ethnic Persians or Iranians in other languages, such as Greek and Arabic, to be included. At the same time, not all literature written in Persian is written by ethnic Persians or Iranians, as Turkic, Caucasian, and Indic poets and writers have also used the Persian language in the environment of Persianate cultures.
Ai Ogawa was an American poet and educator who won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems. Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. About writing in the dramatic monologue form, she's said: "I want to take the narrative 'persona' poem as far as I can, and I've never been one to do things in halves. All the way or nothing. I won't abandon that desire."
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