Hakakian was born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran. She was barely a teenager during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. After the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the rise in anti-semitism as well as social and economic pressures and ongoing war with Iraq, she emigrated in May 1985, to the United States on political asylum. She studied psychology at Brooklyn College and also studied poetry under the American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg during her time there.