Overland Storage Sales Exec Is Kite Runner Author's Sister

Khaled Hosseini is the author of the novels "Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns." "Kite Runner" is also the title of an Academy Award-nominated film based on the Book, Hosseini's first English-language novel.

Raya Hosseini, joined San Diego, Calif.-based Overland just over two years ago to oversee the transition of manufacturing from her former employer, San Jose, Calif.-based contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI. She was promoted to vice president of Americas sales in February after managing Overland's DMR (direct market reseller) sales.

Raya Hosseini and her two older brothers and two younger brothers were born in Kabul, Afghanistan, where their father was a diplomat. They moved to Paris, France in 1976, two years before the 1978 coup that brought a pro-Soviet government into power in Afghanistan, and three years before the Soviet military marched into Afghanistan

As children, Raya Hosseini, her next youngest brother, and Khaled Hosseini, who was two years older than her, used to write stories and act them out with each other. "I wrote my stories, and my brothers laughed," she said. "My younger brother wrote his stories, and we'd laugh. But when Khaled wrote, we listened. He was a great writer even then."

Raya Hosseini first met Overland several years ago when Sanmina-SCI transferred her to San Diego to do sales. She started cold-calling potential customers from a list of companies in a book she bought. One of those was Overland, where it took several calls to finally get transferred to the right contact.

Eventually, she left Sanmina-SCI due to internal issues, and was hired by Overland, which went through hard times when it first transferred its production to Sanmina-SCI to reduce costs but then restarted its own production lines after production problems with the contract manufacturer.

"Kite Runner" is the story of the relationship between a wealthy Afghan boy and his childhood friend set against the backdrop of political changes in Afghanistan from the monarchy through the Communist and then the Taliban periods and more recent times.