Tina Ehsanipour is an Iranian-born, California-raised writer, high school Creative Writing teacher, and school librarian. She was two years old when she left Iran with her family, an age she likes to describe as too young to remember, but too old to forget. Through influential writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, she has learned to embrace the borderland identity that was birthed from that move.

With every story she tells, Tina comes closer to finding her way back home.

Tina writes both Adult and YA fiction with a touch of the magical. She was named the 2025 winner of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, and was also a finalist for the 2025 SmokeLong Emerging Writer Fellowship.

Her work has appeared in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman (Woodhall Press, Sept 2022), Diode Poetry Journal, streetcake magazine, The Rumpus, Nowruz Journal, South Writ Large Magazine, In Short – The Podcast, Five Minutes, as well as on stage with Golden Thread Productions, a San Francisco-based theatre company focused on the Middle East.

She is represented by agent Serene Hakim at Pande Literary.

Tina earned her BA in in Psychology from UC Berkeley and her MA in Education from Stanford University. Tina lives in the Bay Area with her husband and twins.

Reach out to Tina directly via email or connect on Bluesky or Instagram where you can find her sharing her thoughts about books, teaching, and other things.