Maria Saba is a writer, storyteller, and arts educator. Writing in both Persian and English, she has published three books of nonfiction. Her short story manuscript, “My First Friend,” was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. The title story of the same collection was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and won Scoundrel Time’s Editors’ Choice Award in 2018. Saba's novella, “The Secret of Names,” was long listed for the Disquiet Literary Prize in 2020. She also won the PEN Canada Scholarship for Writers in Exile and the Wallace Stegner Grant for the arts. Born in Iran, Saba now lives in Ottawa.