Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi was an AEP Summer Research Program undergraduate scholar involved in the McNair Program and Faculty Mentor Program. She graduated from UC San Diego in 2004 with a degree in Latin American Studies and Creative Writing.

Azareen's Work

Azareen is the author of the novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, a Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller and named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by over twenty publications. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012).

Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from ART OMI and has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Her novel AREZU is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2021. Fra Keeler has been translated into Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. Call Me Zebra was published in the UK by Alma Books and is forthcoming in Turkey, China, Japan, and Romania. She is Iranian-American and has lived in Catalonia, Italy, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.   

Related Links

McNair Program

Faculty Mentor Program

Article:   Merry, Stephanie. "Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s ‘Call Me Zebra’ wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction" Washington Post, 29 Apr. 2019