Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national best-seller “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, a vivid portrait of the Islamic revolution in and how it affected one university professor and her students. Nafisi is the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Her new book, “Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories”, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009. She lives in Washington, D.C.