As professor, academic scholar and award-winning poet, Roger Sedarat has established himself as an esteemed member of Queens College’s English Department. Yet, before developing the first Middle-Eastern American Literature course on campus and contributing scholarship on the hybrid crossing of Persian and American writing, Sedarat was an undergraduate student taking orders at a fast food drive thru in Texas. “I had a very unconventional academic upbringing. With zero money to attend college, I was lucky to attend a good state university, but I had to work at a Wendy’s drive thru, followed by work study and various temporary jobs to afford school back then,” Sedarat recalled. Although he currently devotes…