Jason Rezaian

Jason Rezaian is an Iranian-American journalist who served as Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post. He was convicted of espionage in a closed-door trial in Iran in 2015.
His book Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, published in January 2019, details his experience in captivity in Iran.

Jason was born March 15, 1976, and raised in Marin County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wheaton Central High School in Wheaton, Illinois, in his freshman and sophomore years from 1990 to 1992, before transferring to Marin Academy in San Rafael, California, where he got his high school diploma. He holds both American and Iranian citizenship. His late father, Taghi, emigrated to the U.S. from Iran in 1959; and belonged to a Shia family who were caretakers of the Shia shrine in Mashhad, Iran. His mother, Mary (née Breme), originally from Chicago, moved from the U.S. to Turkey following her husband’s death. His mother was an Evangelical Christian and he has one brother.
Jason had been based in Iran as a journalist since 2009. Before becoming the Post’s Tehran correspondent in 2012, he wrote for other publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and Monocle. His wife, Yeganeh Salehi, is an Iranian citizen who is a correspondent for The National, a newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates. After Salehi was arrested, her press credentials were revoked.
He was the 2016 recipient of the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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A personal note from Jason Rezaian.

Sent April 26th, following his Conversations with Authors session.

Dear Friends of Book Passage,

Thanks so much for joining Yegi and me yesterday for a video discussion. It was a wonderful reminder that, although we can’t be with each other in person right now, we’re not so far away as we sometimes think we are.

In my loneliest hours, books were my most cherished companions.

Here are a few titles that have sustained Yegi and me and helped us remain engaged. We hope some of them will resonate with you, too!

Jason’s Books

• No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison Behrouz Boochani
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius   Dave Eggers
• The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
• Animal Farm: Centennial Edition George Orwell
• Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition by Joseph Heller
• Norwegian Wood by Huruki Murakami
• Pudd’nhead Wilson: and Those Extraordinary Twins Mark Twain

Yegi’s books

• Saved by Beauty: Adventures of an American Romantic in Iran by Roger Housden
• Together Tea Marjan Kamali
• Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East Kim Ghattas

Stay healthy and stay home (for now)!

– Jason