Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of the novel, FALSE PROPHET, which releases July 7, 2026 from Melville House. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.

FICTION

Excerpt from False Prophet

By AFSHEEN FARHADI

My mother’s death had punctured some hole in me that drained all my confidence and joy. Everything felt wrong, so I did nothing, backing out of meetings with producers, retreating from every door success opened.