Porochista Khakpour (Persian: پوروچیستا خاکپور, born January 17, 1978) is an Iranian American novelist, essayist, and journalist.

A refugee from Iran whose family fled the Iran-Iraq War and the Islamic Revolution,[1] Khakpour grew up in the Greater Los Angeles area[2] before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College.

[7] Her parents, Manijeh and Asha Khakpour, met while working together at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

[12] After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, her family fled Iran as refugees, transiting through Turkey, France, and Switzerland before eventually resettling in the Greater Los Angeles area.

[13] As a 3-year-old refugee crisscrossing Europe on trains, Khakpour told her parents stories to pass the time,[14] which her father wrote down and she would illustrate.

[15] When Khakpour’s family first arrived in the United States, they lived in a hotel on Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles; she played daily in nearby MacArthur Park.

[16] Her family made their way to the San Gabriel Valley, briefly living in Monterey Park[17] and Alhambra[18] before finally moving into a two-bedroom, one-bathroom dingbat apartment in South Pasadena, where Khakpour grew up.

[25] Khakpour received a Hearst Scholarship to attend Sarah Lawrence College,[26] where she studied under Danzy Senna[27] and Victoria Redel.

[30] In 2001, Khakpour was living in the East Village, where she witnessed the 9/11 attacks from the windows of her then-boyfriend’s twenty-fifth floor Manhattan apartment.

[40] Before publishing her first novel, Khakpour worked as a journalist, covering arts and entertainment as well as producing in-depth investigative journalism.

[51] In 2011, Khakpour was the guest editor of Guernica's first Iranian-American issue,[52] curating works from writers including Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Azadeh Moaveni, Nahid Rachlin, Hooman Majd, Roger Sedarat, and Sholeh Wolpé.

[54] Much of the book was completed during writers' residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Yaddo, and Ucross, and at the New Mexico home of her friend Valerie Plame.

[75] Tehrangeles follows the lives of the four Milani sisters, Iranian-American snack food heiresses on the verge of their own reality television show.

[76] Kirkus Reviews described the novel as "a kind of hyperreal neon inversion of Little Women, if the March girls had to deal with hashtags, eating disorders, microaggressions, and group chats".

[90] She was guest faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine.

[102] Khakpour has also received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Northwestern University, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo and Djerassi.