CCA MFA WRITING
San Francisco
About
JASMIN DARZNIK is the New York Times bestselling author of three acclaimed books and chair of the CCA MFA Writing program. Born in Iran and having immigrated to America at age five, she holds an MFA from Bennington College and a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University.
Her memoir The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life became a New York Times bestseller and was finalist for the Library of Virginia's People's Choice Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her debut novel Song of a Captive Bird, inspired by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, won the Writer's Center First Novel Prize, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and became both a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her latest novel The Bohemians, which imagines photographer Dorothea Lange's early years in 1920s San Francisco, was selected by Oprah Daily as one of 2021's best historical novels.
Darznik's books have been published in nineteen countries. She has received fellowships from Princeton University, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Steinbeck Fellows Program, Bennington Writers Seminars, and Yaddo, plus an Outstanding Faculty Award from Virginia's State Council of Higher Education. She has contributed to the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Her forthcoming novel explores gender and race in Old Hollywood. It will be published in 2026 by Random House's Ballantine imprint.
Under her leadership, CCA's MFA program celebrates 25 years of innovative literary education while continuously evolving to meet contemporary writers' needs. Her courses in the program explore the intersection of storytelling and social justice.
Education
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PhD, English Literature, Princeton University
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MFA, Bennington College
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JD, University of California, San Francisco
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BA, UCLA, summa cum laude
To Write Is To Serve,
Jasmin Darznik
In my classes at CCA and in my own writing practice, I return again and again to this: the best writing comes when it’s an act of service.
We are taught to think of writing as an expression of ego, as if the page were a place to showcase the unique self. But what I’ve seen—and felt—is that the opposite is true. The most powerful writing comes when we set aside the relentless insistence on ‘I’ and surrender to something larger, something that asks to be carried into language through us.
Service can take many forms. It might be to the planet, whose beauty and fragility we cannot bear to lose. It might be to the people around us, to our ancestors, to the silenced and forgotten voices of history. Whatever form it takes, the more deeply we serve what we love—what we can’t bear to have vanish—the more vitality and urgency flow into our writing.
This runs counter to the myth of the lone outsider, the figure writing against the world in order to assert his singular vision. What I’ve come to understand is that writing is a way of placing ourselves in the long, unbroken line of human memory, of carrying forward what might otherwise disappear.
And here is the paradox: the more we surrender, the more we discover our truest selves. Writing becomes less a matter of will or discipline than of alignment—listening for the call, offering ourselves as instruments, and allowing the work to pass through us. In this way, the act of writing becomes not just a record of who we are, but a testament to what we serve.
– Jasmin Darznik, Chair and Associate Professor, CCA MFA Writing
Books
