Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author Siamak Vossoughi will be reading from his new Kirkus-starred collection, The Friend Seekers, composed of stories that wrestle with the meaning of what it is to be both Iranian and American today.

Siamak Vossoughi is an Iranian-American writer living in Seattle. His first collection, Better Than War, received a 2014 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and his second collection, A Sense of the Whole, received the Orison Fiction Prize. His stories have also appeared in Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, West Branch, and in other journals.