Mahdi Ganjavi is a poet, literary translator, editor, and scholar. Ganjavi's poetry is experimental and innovative in its attempt to establish bold, refreshing and sometimes seemingly contradictory dialogue between Persian classical literature and contemporary avant-garde reformulations of the genre in general. Ganjavi's co-translations of likoos, a syllabic poetry of Southeast Iran has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, in Asymptote and in the Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (2021, Green Linden Press). Ganjavi's translation of high modernist, eco-poetry and New York School English poetry to Persian is published in several literary magazines such as Neveshta and Namomken. He has also contributed a translation to "Shades of Truth: Iranian Short Fiction of the Fifth Generation in Translation" (Mannani, M & E. Dehnavi Eds., Mazda, 2019).In the last seven years, Dr. Ganjavi edited, reintroduced, and oversaw the publication of six little-known Persian novels from the 1920s-1940s. These novels shed light on the origins of science fiction, detective fiction, historical and utopian fiction in Persian. He recently finalized and submitted the first critical edition of "Henriyeh Translation", the earliest Persian translation of "One Thousand and One Nights" (forthcoming with Maniahonar). Dr. Ganjavi's scholarly work focuses on the transnational history of literature, education, translation, print and publication, the cultural Cold War and the politics of archive and historiography in contemporary Middle East. His scholarly writings have appeared in the Encyclopedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, and Review of the Middle East Studies.
