Agha Shaid Ali, 18th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Poet Agha Shahid Ali teaches in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His six collections of poetry include A Nostalgist’s Map of America, The Half Inch Himalayas, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages and The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems. He has also translated The Rebel’s Silhouette, a selection of poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz as well as the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor. His poems appear regularly in journals such as Antioch Review, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Field, Grand Street, Paris Review Poetry, TriQuarterly and Yale Review. He has won fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Ingram-Merril Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the New York Foundation for the Art. His recent — as yet uncollected — poems focus on the current turmoil in Kashmir, where he is from originally and where he spends his summers