We are pleased to welcome poet and translator Roz Naimi to the Research Station, where she will be developing her translation of poet Mina Asadi's "Who Casts the Stones?," forthcoming with World Poetry Books in early 2027.

Roz Shayan Naimi is a poet, translator, and editor based in New York. She received an MFA from Columbia University in poetry and literary translation in 2024.

Mina Asadi (born in Sari, Iran 1943) is a poet, songwriter and journalist who has made most of her career in exile in Stockholm, Sweden since leaving Iran in 1974. She has earned a reputation as an iconoclast for her feminist, class-conscious, and critical poetics. Asadi has been censored on various fronts: in Iran, for her unabashed use of slang, allusions to the risqué, and appropriation of religious recitation; and by the diaspora, for her refusal to participate in the nostalgia-clouded revisionism of life under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Taken together, her work offers an indictment of those in Iran and the diaspora who have contributed to the political fragmentation of Iranians—above all working-class Iranians, before and after 1979. Her perspective is especially vital amidst a general dearth of twentieth-century Iranian women’s voices; to bring her into English will give interested readers a unique vantage on the poetry of the period.

Her other works include the collections: Without Love, Without Regard; I Call a Ring Bondage; Mina Asadi; Don't Hesitate, The Predators are on Their Way; Three Views on Death; First Person; Nothing of Love Exists in the World; Pimps, all of which remain untranslated.

About the Book:

Who Casts the Stones? is Asadi’s second and most renowned collection. Written between 1966 and 1970, it narrates a young woman’s politicization through recursive, acerbic observation and self-reflection. In Asadi’s ambivalent poetic world, the speaker tugs herself between a desire for refuge inside language, and a deep distrust for its role in authorizing hierarchies of gender and class. Asadi’s poetry reflects and transcends the weight of this political context in the decades before the Islamic Revolution. Iran in the 1960s–70s was a period of modernization amidst widespread poverty—depictions of which fell under the Shah’s censorship of critical media and repression of dissent. The poems in this book contend with the tension of speaking aloud interior histories within a society organized around submission.