Haleh Liza Gafori

Premier Translator of Rumi
Vocalist, Poet, Educator

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • The Insight of Rumi
  • Love & Alchemy: Rumi in Conversation with Poets, Essayists, and Our Times
  • The I’s and You’s in Rumi’s Poetry
  • The Art of Translation: Fidelity, Freedom, Afterlife
  • The Art of Recitation
  • An Evening with Haleh Liza Gafori

Biography

“There’s a rich fluency here not just in idiom but in gesture, in spirit. It’s uncanny to encounter eight-hundred-year-old verse this urgent. Gafori’s Rumi teaches me how to wander into mystery—“humble as soil”—without galloping toward some hasty and inorganic conclusion. What a gift this is, what gold.” —Kaveh Akbar

“Gorgeous, fluent, faithful.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, performance artist, poet, vocalist, and educator born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed translations of poems by the 13th century sage Rumi have been published in two volumes Gold (2022) and Water (2025) by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics.

A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of contemporary American free verse and to the subtleties of the original Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems, offering poems that urgently and tenderly dialogue with our times. Sharing her passion for Rumi’s poetry and the liberating messages that pulse through them, Gafori has lectured and offered workshops across the country and abroad at universities and institutions including Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, the Academy of American Poets, Columbia University, the Women’s Library in Istanbul, and Union Theological Seminary.

As a performance artist, Gafori presents Rumi’s poetry in cross-media events that weave translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, revealing the often unheard and astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text. She has performed at New York Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Le Poisson Rouge, the Bradford Literary Fest, Lincoln Center, and elsewhere.

Gafori is a 2026 and 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts. Her translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, Paris Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, and others. She is on faculty at St Joseph’s University’s Brooklyn Writers Foundry MFA Program in Creative Writing, teaching the Art of Translation.

Gafori received her BS in Biology from Stanford University and her MFA from CCNY in Poetry where she completed a thesis of original poems as well as translations of the Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri for which she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. After receiving her MFA, she spent many years composing music, sometimes for TV and film, performing with various projects at venues such as the Bonnaroo Festival, Preservation Jazz Hall in New Orleans, and David Byrne’s series at Carnegie Hall. Around fires and beside rivers in jungles and cities, she learned songs and chants, in Persian and English, and sometimes in Spanish, Yoruban, and Portuguese. All of these experiences prepared her to return to her ancestral culture in 2016, this time to translate the poetry of Rumi which had spiraled through her life since childhood. After completing two volumes, she continues to translate and is working on essays about the translation process as well as on a book of her own poems.

TESTIMONIALS

“I have never seen this kind of enthusiasm for a class and teacher.”
-Ricardo Maldonado, President and Executive Director, Academy of American Poets

Short Bio

Haleh Liza Gafori is a New York City-born translator, performance artist, writer and educator of Iranian descent. Her two volumes of translations of poetry by the 13th century sage Rumi, entitled Gold (2022) and Water (2025), were published by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics. Gafori was a 2026 and 2024 MacDowell fellow, and a 2023 recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts grant. She created a musical and cross-media performance based on the book and has presented her work, via performance and lectures and workshops, at institutions such as Lincoln Center, Stanford University, the Academy of American Poets, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published by Columbia University Press, Harvard Review, World Literature Today, Lit Hub, Paris Review, and others. She teaches at the MFA writing program at St. Joseph’s University, and her books of translations Gold and Water have been incorporated in the curricula of universities across the country.

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