Archive Event Highlight
Sept. 9 BOOK NIGHT- ‘For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising’
Location: Online via Zoom
Date: 09 September 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Nilo Tabrizy, a video reporter for The Washington Post’s visual forensics team and a governor of the OPC, will discuss her new book For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising, on Zoom on September 9.
Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter with The New York Times Magazine and a
professor at Columbia Journalism School, will moderate the discussion. Khan runs the Li Center for Global Journalism at Columbia and is a longtime governor of the OPC.
The program is cosponsored by the OPC and the Li Center.
The book’s story starts in September 2022, when a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime, despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran. And across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family as a child, covered the protests and state violence, knowing that spotlighting the women on the front lines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future.
Though they had met only once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms to protect Fatemeh. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means to cover the stories that are closest to one’s heart—both in the forefront and from afar.
