Ru?y?. ?akk?kiy?n

Roya Hakakian (Persian: رویا حکاکیان) (born 1966 in Iran) is an Iranian-American poet, journalist and writer living in the United States. A lauded Persian poet turned television producer with programs like 60 Minutes, Roya became well known for her memoir, Journey from the Land of No in 2004, which won Elle Magazine's Reader's Choice Award. She writes frequent essays on Iranian issues in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and on NPR. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, Roya published Assassins of the Turquoise Palace in 2011, a non-fiction account of the Mykonos restaurant assassinations of Iranian opposition leaders in Berlin. Her most recent work is called A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious, expected in March 2021 by Knopf.

Roya was a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and served on the board of Refugees International. She is also a nonfiction instructor at the Yale THREAD program, and is currently a fellow at Yale's Davenport College. Harry Kreisler's Political Awakenings: Conversations with History, highlighted Roya among '20 of the most important activists, academics, and journalists of our generation.'