She is not a Woman

Fatemeh Ekhtesari (b. 1986, Iran) is an Iranian poet, writer, translator, editor, and human rights activist based in Lillehammer, Norway where she moved to as an ICORN writer in residence in 2017. She is a trained midwife, a vocation that informs her writing. Her activism and writing caused her to be censored and persecuted by the state of Iran and she was imprisoned in 2013 and received a sentence of eleven and half years incarceration and ninety nine lashes. She left Iran in 2015. She has written two Norwegian poetry collections and her current work entails poetry, translation, literary collaborations, and a narrative non-fiction project documenting gender apartheid through the personal stories of women from Iran, Afghanistan, and other affected communities.