SOCIAL PRACTICE, INTERDISCIPLINARY, NONFICTION

PARDISS KEBRIAEI

Pardiss Kebriaei is a writer and human rights lawyer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Born in Iran, she immigrated with her family to Oklahoma as a child and spent her first years in the United States in Norman and Stillwater. She has worked on issues of incarceration for 17 years, representing individuals and communities affected by detention and imprisonment both in the U.S. and abroad. Her work is shaped by personal and historical connections, including her father’s experience as a political prisoner in Iran.

Since 2007, she has been a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she first worked on post-9/11 detentions at Guantanamo Bay and now focuses on life imprisonment and extreme sentencing in the U.S. She is engaging with organizations and advocates in Tulsa and Oklahoma to explore these issues locally.

Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and Rolling Stone and has been supported by residencies at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Headlands Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, PLAYA, and Willapa Bay AiR. She was a finalist in nonfiction literature for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2020 and a 2021-22 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.