Porochista Khakpour, the Iranian-American novelist and essayist known for her fiction exploring identity, belonging, and the immigrant experience, delivered a vivid and unconventional graduation address at Desert Academy in Santa Fe. As a creative writing professor and fiction writer, she brought a storyteller's sensibility to the occasion. Khakpour reframed the post-graduation transition not as entering the 'real world' but as an act of self-creation. She compared it to a snake shedding its skin — the graduates had been 'weighed down by this thick old inherited skin, getting heavier and heavier as you climbed up these 12 or so rungs called grades.' Now they could shed that dead weight. The metaphor of being 'about to be born' was deliberate. Khakpour, who had attended a large public school in Southern California as an acne-prone, nerdy immigrant kid, had reinvented herself at college by choosing the most different school she could find — 3,000 miles away, smaller than her high school, with no grades and no exams. Her first night sleeping away from her parents was her first night of college. She knew firsthand what it meant to be born into a new self.