Mo H. Saidi
Physician Poet Author
Poet, short story writer, award winning fiction novelist
and obstetrician/gynecologist.
Co-founder of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine.
The author sitting for his Medical School Entrance Exams 1967.
Take a journey through the shadows.
A MEMOIR BY DR. MO H. SAIDI
Tragic Love: Living With Shadows by Mo H. Saidi is a reflective memoir that traces the author’s life from his childhood in Iran to his professional and personal journey in the United States. Through vivid storytelling, the narrative explores themes of love, memory, cultural identity, resilience, and loss. Blending personal experiences with historical events such as World War II, the Iranian Revolution, and the evolution of modern medicine—the memoir captures the struggles and triumphs of a man shaped by family, education, romance, and immigration. At its heart, the book is a deep human story about first love, heartbreak, ambition, and the enduring power of memory in shaping one’s life.
A lyrical memoir that traces a young man’s journey from Iran to America, shaped by love, loss, memory, and the search for meaning across cultures.
Available in December
Excerpt from
"The Mansion of my Childhood"
About life in Iran before Dr. Saidi immigrated to the U.S. in 1969 recalls a family expecting him to become a mullah, while he "always dreamed to be a writer,” and “We made peace: they burned the chess board/and the pieces; I buried the Holy Book.”
About Mo
Mo H Saidi is a physician-writer born in Iran who moved to the United States in 1969 and became an American citizen in 1975. Saidi published over 30 medical and scientific papers and earned a master’s in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2007. His first book of poetry, Art in the City, won the PST Manuscript Award and was published in 2007. In 2010, St. Mary’s University Press published his second collection, The Color of Faith. Garland Publishing House in New York published Saidi’s Handbook for Women Seeking Sterilization. His collection of short fiction, The Garden of Milk and Wine, was published in 2010, and Between A and Z: Poems in 2015. The Marchers: A Novel was published in 2016 and was chosen as best fiction by the Express-News editors. Participant Media considered the novel for a film, but it was not made into one. His second novel, Esther and the Genius, was published in 2017. His fifth book of poetry, Name the River: Poems with Annotation, was released on March 1, 2025. Saidi’s poems and prose have won and have been published in local, state, and national awards, including the 2017 Chautauqua Short Fiction Award, the Poetry Society of Texas, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Prize Poems anthology: “Encore,” on the Poetry Foundation website, in Boston Review, Poet Magazine, and Poetry Foundation.