HALEH LIZA GAFORI is a performance artist, translator, vocalist, poet, and musician born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed book of translations, GOLD, Poems by Rumi was published by New York Review Books in 2022, and her second volume WATER will be released on April 22, 2025, also by NYRB Classics.  A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of American free verse as well as to the subtleties of the Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems into contemporary American poetry.

Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant supporting the development of her cross-media performance piece based on GOLD. Weaving translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, she offers audiences glimpses of the astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text, while uncovering how deeply and urgently the poetry dialogues with our times.

Gafori’s translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Palewell Press, and elsewhere.

Sharing her passion for Rumi’s poetry and the liberating messages that pulse through them, Gafori has presented her musical cross-media piece, lectures, readings, and craft workshops at universities, festivals, and institutions including Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Sarah Lawrence College, Lincoln Center, Omega Institute, Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, the Bradford Literary Fest, and the New York Public Library.

Of her seminars at the Academy of American Poets, Executive Director Ricardo Maldonado, said “I have never seen this kind of enthusiasm for a class and teacher.”

Gafori received her BS in Biology from Stanford U 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, touring with various projects, and playing such venues as the Bonnaroo Festival, Preservation Jazz Hall in New Orleans, and David Byrne’s series at Carnegie Hall, She sat around fires and beside rivers in jungles and cities, listening and learning songs and chants, in Persian and English, and sometimes in Spanish, Yoruban, and Portuguese. All of these experiences prepared her to return once again to the culture of her ancestral roots, and in 2016, she began to translate the poetry of Molana Rumi who had spiraled through her life since childhood. Now, after completing two volumes, she is working on essays about the translation process and on a book of her own poems.