Presented by Penn's Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures

Aria Aber is an Afghan poet and novelist, who grew up in Germany and now lives in the United States. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont.

Aber's debut poetry collection, Hard Damage (2019), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Her premiere novel, Good Girl, was published in 2025. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet and is a contributing editor at The Yale Review.

Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

Cosponsored by Penn's Creative Writing Program; Departments of English; Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies; and South Asia Studies; Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies; Middle East Center; Program in Comparative Literature & Theory; School of Arts & Sciences, and Wolf Humanities Center.