Zara Houshmand is an Iranian American writer whose work bridges cultural divides and includes poetry, theatre, new media arts, memoir, and literary translation. She was one of the pioneers in the use of virtual reality as an art form and her installation Beyond Manzanar (with Tamiko Thiel), now in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, has been exhibited widely around the world. Her early work in theater with Bijan Mofid led to award-winning translations of his plays, and her own plays have been produced in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her poetry is widely published in journals and in the anthologies Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006) and A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999). She worked with the Mind & Life Institute for two decades as the editor of books on the Dalai Lama’s dialogues with Western scientists, and has edited many other books on Buddhism. Her collaborative writing includes A Mirror Garden (2007) with Monir Shahroudi Farmanfarmaian, and Running Toward Mystery (2020) with the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi. Her translations from Rumi are published in a bilingual edition, Moon and Sun: A Selection of Rumi’s Rubaiyat (2020).