A One-Question Interview with Afsheen Farhadi

2 Minutes Read Time

A mirror on the wall that reflects the room it is in — Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

On Thursday, September 10, 2026, The Visiting Writers Series returns for the 2026-27 academic year. Afsheen Farhadi, a former UC creative writing PhD student, is one of the featured readers. I emailed Farhadi a question about his debut novel, False Prophet (2026, Melville House).

Prince Bush: In your debut, the protagonist, Jal, writes a memoir about his mother’s adolescence. There is a long and rich history of novels that depict characters writing books. What do you think of this tradition, and what would you say you contributed to it?

Afsheen Farhadi: As a writer, I’ve always felt that the act of storytelling can, in your own life, have dramatic potential. In my debut, False Prophet, I was interested in structuring a novel around this idea. There were several craft decisions I had to consider. The greatest challenge was that the story within the story, if it was going to share equal space with the frame, would have to carry equal dramatic weight and be just as satisfying—have a beginning, middle, and end, and be as narratively complete as if it stood alone.

At the same time, I consider the novel to primarily be a character study, and as such, I also knew that the frame story—about actor Jal Persad, who for various reason makes up a lie about his mother’s involvement in the Jonestown cult and begins writing a memoir that very quickly gets away from him—and the story within the story had to continually be speaking to each other. While the frame is directly about Jal, the story within the story reveals his character every bit as much, though from a different angle. In reading Jal’s fantasy, in learning the life he wishes he’d had, it’s my hope that the reader learns something about Jal that even he isn’t completely aware of, learns something that as the novel goes on, builds upon itself, giving us a more complete view of a person whose motives, desires, and fears generate much of the novel’s momentum.

Prince Bush

is a poet from Nashville whose poems appear in The Believer, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He received a fellowship from the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets while earning his BA in English as an Erastus Milo Cravath Presidential Scholar at Fisk University. Currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati as a Yates Fellow, Bush earned his MFA in from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a Truman Capote Literary Fellow.

A man with short black hair slightly grinning in a black shirt sitting indoors.

Afsheen Farhadi

was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of the novel, False Prophet (2026, Melville House), and the forthcoming essay collection, The Creeps: Meditations On Horror (Fall 2027, University of Iowa Press).

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.

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