Walled In, Walled Out: A Young American Woman in Iran - Paperback

by Mary Dana Marks (Author)

When Mary joins the Peace Corps the shah reigns in Iran and John F. Kennedy has left his mark on the world. Sent to Kerman, a conservative city on the Iranian plateau, she teaches English to high school girls. In the classroom, or walking through the bazaar amid turbaned Baluchi tribesmen and chanting Sufi dervishes, she is the exotic one. The adobe walls that seclude women exclude her, a bareheaded foreigner. Woven throughout are dusty travels from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, colorful feasts, rich history and hidden romance. Walled In, Walled Out recounts her convoluted, often humorous journey from ignorance to understanding in a country where the people speak with many voices.

Author Biography

Mary Dana Marks served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kerman, Iran from 1964-66. After earning a master's degree in library science from the University of Michigan, she returned to Iran where she worked as librarian of the UNESCO-affiliated International Institute for Adult Literacy Methods in Tehran and taught English as a second language. She and her family left Iran five years before its 1979 revolution. Marks spent most of her career as library director for the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Editor of the award-winning Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia, she lives with her husband in New York City.