Tag: Memoir

Googoosh in conversation with Nazanin Boniadi (virtual event)

Join us for a virtual Live Talks Los Angeles event:
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 6pm PT/9pm ET
 
**Googoosh
in conversation with Nazanin Boniadi
discussing her memoir, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice.”**

*This event is taped on December 4.*

VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (US Orders Only)
Thursday, December 11, 6pm PT/9pm ET
$48 Virtual Admission + book with signed book plate (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on December 11 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days..

Before there was Madonna or Beyoncé, there was **Googoosh**. For the first time, one of the world’s biggest pop stars of the 20th century tells her remarkable story in her new memoir, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice”—her rise to fame in pre-revolution Iran, her arrest and imprisonment, her twenty-year exile, and finally, her triumphant return to the global stage.

Born Faegheh Atashin in 1950, Googoosh is Iran’s first and biggest popstar. She lives in Los Angeles.

In this lyrical and moving memoir, she takes us through her difficult upbringing in Iran’s tumultuous 1950s and ’60s to her stardom in the ’70s—and what it was like to reach the peak of her career during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Seemingly overnight, she went from being on magazine covers, at film premieres and fashion shows, and constantly on the radio, to targeted by religious clerics. What followed is a harrowing tale of oppression, intimidation, and exile.

Now, inspired by the brave women of Iran on the front lines fighting for their freedoms, Googoosh finally tells her full story, and with it, the story of a country once again on the brink.

**Nazanin Boniadi** is an Iranian-born actress and renowned human rights advocate. Her television credits include Homeland, How I Met Your Mother, and Counterpart.’On the big screen, she won acclaim for her memorable role in Bombshell and her leading role in Hotel Mumbai. As an activist, she has partnered with various charitable organizations to campaign for the rights of disenfranchised populations across the world, with a focus on the unjust conviction and treatment of Iranian youth, women and prisoners of conscience.  Her thought leadership has been featured in major global media outlets, and her advocacy work has taken her to the halls of power around the world.

WeHo Reads Returns for an Inspiring Fall 2022 Season

Posted onAuthorcodysisco

We’re back! After a summer hiatus, BookSwell returns with three events on the ROAD TO JOY!

9/20 WeHo Reads: Expansive Vistas and Hidden Corners

The next WeHo Reads event is Expansive Vistas and Hidden Corners on Tuesday, September 20, 2022, at 6 p.m. Artists and writers explore concepts of places, how they’re made, and how we understand, remember, and memorialize them.

Lynell George is a journalist and essayist based in Los Angeles, who tells the city’s story one sentence at a time. Her book, After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press 2018), is an exploration of the city in text and photography, and she explores the extraordinary creative life of Octavia E. Butler in A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, published by Angel City Press in 2020. She will be in discussion with Marisela Norte, an American writer, poet, and artist living in Los Angeles and known for poetry that explores the unseen city, including her poetry collection Peeping Tom Tom Girl (Sunbelt Publications 2008). Together, they will explore hidden corners of Los Angeles and the poetry of the city in images and text.

RSVP to Attend via Zoom

10/5 WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Across America

There will also be a special October 2022 event featuring a selection of poets from the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship Program. These poets laureate were all chosen by the Academy to receive a $50,000 award to help support creative work and community engagement projects, and several of them will gather to share about the projects they created.

WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Across America takes place on Wednesday, October 5, 2022, at 6 p.m.  In 2020, the Academy of American Poets awarded more than $1 million to 23 poets laureate as part of a year-long Fellowship to support their creative and organizing work. One of these awards went to City of West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace who also serves as this event’s host. This reading brings together a group of these Fellows from across the country in the aftermath of their Fellowships to share what they did, read their writing, and reflect on the state of poetry across the United States.

RSVP to Attend via Zoom

11/15 WeHo Reads: Light in Our Hearts

Light in Our Hearts concludes the 2022 WeHo Reads season on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, at 6 p.m. 

The culminating event in the series will bring together poets, writers, and artists who live and create at the intersection of joy and hope and reckoning with pain. bridgette bianca is a poet and educator from South Central Los Angeles. Her debut book of poetry, be/trouble, is a powerful love letter to oft-overlooked Los Angeles, one that offers as much danger as it does glamour and as much grit as beauty. traci kato-kiriyama is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer/author, actor, arts educator & community organizer. Her recently published book from Writ Large Press, Navigating With(out) Instruments, is a collection of poetics, micro essays, and notes to self (and other)—a journey of several years, navigating through death moments, past/present tensions of war and violence, trauma and ideation, excavation, and memory. Cassandra Lane is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her first book, WE ARE BRIDGES: A Memoir, weaves personal and historical geographies, lineages, upbringings, and upheavals into a complete tapestry, validating her glorious existence as a Black mother. There will also be closing remarks from series opener Shonda Buchanan.

RSVP to Attend via Zoom