Margaret Kahn is the author of Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country, published by Seaview Books in 1980 and excerpted in Self Magazine. Portions of the book were also excerpted in Global Insights, a widely used high school textbook published by Charles Merrill.
Her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Ararat, the quarterly review published by the Armenian General Benevolent Union (four stories), West, the Sunday magazine section of the San Jose Mercury News, Iowa Woman and Best of Iowa Woman, Crab Orchard Review, Red Wheelbarrow, and Pangyrus.
Her short plays have been chosen for staged readings and productions by the Pear Theatre in Mountain View, California, City Lights Theatre in San Jose, Pegasus Theater in Sonoma County, Broadway West in Fremont, and Ross Valley Players in Marin County. Her full length play about an Iranian-American mother and daughter in Los Angeles was chosen for a staged reading by the Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival and given a full production at the Pear Theatre in 2012. Her second full-length play, The Packrat Gene, is scheduled to open at the Ross Valley Players’ Barn Theater in 2022.
Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey and Maryland, she is a graduate of Barnard College where she majored in linguistics and minored in writing. She pursued graduate work at the University of Michigan where she received her masters and doctoral degrees in theoretical linguistics. Her dissertation Borrowing and Variation in a Phonological Description of Kurmanji was published as part of the Michigan Phonetics Laboratory’s Natural Language Series. She held a post-doctoral research position at the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT. Later she worked in Silicon Valley as a speech engineer. After bailing out of the tech industry, she edited and published an international newsletter, technology update, and helped organize a conference on access to the graphical user interface for blind people. She is currently the world music director for KZSU radio at Stanford University. She lives in Northern California where she enjoys bicycling and walking next to the ocean with her husband, the neurologist, Phil Wasserstein.