Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a Finalist for the National Book Award, and 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

(Photo credit: Jalil Kochai)