Martin Foroz

My (birth) name is Mohammad Forouzani and Martin Foroz is my pen name through which I genuinely communicate with my readers. I was born in 1964 in Tehran, Iran, and taught at the university for 15 years there before I moved to Oman in 2014 as an expatriate professor of English Language and Literature.

I earned BA and MA degrees in English Literature and a Ph.D. in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). However, my favorite subjects from early school years were Philosophy and Literature, and the passion for thinking, writing, observing, reflecting has been with me from my early teen years. And if you are also wondering whether I have been writing in English or Farsi or both, I’ll say Both! I hold a Sapirian view of language-thought theory and that’s why some of my ink is in Farsi and others in English. I value “meaning” in every sense of the term, and the role that ‘meaning’ plays in human thoughts and interactions as well as in literature and philosophy was the strong incentive for me to author a reference on semantics titled An Illustrative Dictionary of Semantics- ILLUDS (2019).

Apart from my publications in language teaching areas, my poems have appeared in different journals as well as my three collections of poems Inside Out (2017), Out Inside (2019) and A Louvre of Verse (2020). The themes vary from childhood, Nature, and Love, to women and child abuse, war and terrorism, diaspora and displacement, political and ideological clashes, racism, censorship, the quest for freedom of thought and speech, and the like. My short story “A Room for a Decent Burial of Memories” has recently appeared in 34MaG, Issue 80. Literature, Philosophy, and politics are my favorite subjects to read and write about. More about me is available at

https://www.martinforoz.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJczsLzht9lJUhw1RFfkf3g