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Mahru Elahi (she/they/او)
Known for their big laugh, Mahru is a queer Iranian American femme who is compiling a book-length manuscript—THE FUEL OF NATIONS: Essays on Girlhood in Amrika—that unspools their coming of age in the 1970s and 80s, particularly in the aftermath of the 1979 storming of the American Embassy in Tehran. THE FUEL OF NATIONS is in conversation with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Magical Realism, T Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and Elissa Washuta's White Magic.
A 2025 Best of the Net nominee, their essays appear—or are forthcoming—in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Hyphen, Mutha, Multiplicity, the Seventh Wave Community Anthology On Liminality, Sinister Wisdom, and the museum of americana. Mahru's poetry was anthologized in Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora and included in Fireweed, a Canadian feminist journal. Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose anthologizes their graphic storytelling and zine-making. They have received support from Antioch University Los Angeles, Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, Tin House, VONA and the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
A former poet-in-the-schools, high school English teacher, and the current Interview Editor for Lunch Ticket, a literary and art journal from the MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles, Mahru lives in Oakland with their son. Mahru urges you to act against genocide and fascism, and towards a love that cannot be acknowledged by empire.