Haleh Liza Gafori

Week of February 28, 2026

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, performance artist, poet, vocalist, and educator born in NYC of Iranian 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, and the Academy of American Poets.

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, the Bradford Literary Fest, Lincoln Center, and elsewhere.

Gafori is a 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.