Meghan Nuttall Sayres is a writer and tapestry weaver from Washington State who raises sheep, spins and colors the yarn for her tapestries with natural plant dyes. She has traveled in Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, where she has met with scholars, carpet weavers, dyemasters and merchants to study the age-old techniques, symbolism, and Sufi poetry that infuse many rugs woven throughout the Middle East. While in Iran, she attended their First International Children’s Book Festival to speak about her debut novel, Anahita’s Woven Riddle, a story about an Iranian nomadic carpet weaver (Harry N. Abrams, Amulet Books, 2006) This book is an ALA Top Ten Best Books YA 2006, An Indie Pick Winter 2006/2007, and an ALA Amelia Bloomer Project Feminist Book Selection 2008.                           

The novel has been translated into foreign languages and CRS Libri/Rizzoli chose Anahita el’enigma del tappeto, as the featured book at the 2008 Bologna International Book Fair. She has completed a companion novel to Anahita entitled Night Letter. Meghan is also author of Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland (Cork University Press, 2007) and The Shape of Betts  Meadow: A Wetlands Story (Millbrook Press/Lerner, 2002), a John Burroughs Nature Book 2002. She is co-author of Daughters of the Desert: Tales of Remarkable Women from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Traditions (Skylight Paths Press, 2003). Her poems and essays have been published at home and abroad.

Meghan holds a graduate degree in international rural development. She volunteered for ten years as a development specialist and curator of U.S. exhibitions for Taipeis Gael, an Irish tapestry weaving cooperative in Donegal. This work led to her afore mentioned book Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland. She has given talks and workshops on Iran, weaving, interfaith dialogue and creative writing through out the U.S., Ireland, the Middle East and Central Asia. She is at work on a novel Midhe: Neither East nor West, set in Ireland, Macedonia and Turkey, and a nonfiction book Texture of Spirit: Weavings from the Abrahamic and Sufi Traditions. She has studied Turkish in Istanbul through the University of Ankara’s Tomer Language School. This spring she traveled back to Iran as the first American to weave on Iran’s first World Peace Carpet, sponsored by the Saad Abad Historical Society and UNESCO. You may also visit her at: Facebook and Storyforce.blogspot.com.