Agha Shahid Ali

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2001

Agha Shahid Ali, the prominent poet, will be the Spring 2001 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. On the graduate faculty of writing programs at the University of Utah and Warren Wilson College, Ali has held visiting appointments at SUNY Binghamton, Princeton, and New York University and formerly taught at Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He will be teaching a course at Baruch on the poetry of exiles and expatriates.

His seven collections of poetry include: “The Half-Inch Himalayas”; “A Walk Through the Yellow Pages”; “A Nostalgist’s Map of America”; “The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems”; and, most recently, “The Country Without a Post Office,” a collection that focuses on the turmoil in Kashmir, where he is from originally and where he spends his summers.

Ali is the translator of “The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems” by Faiz Ahmed Fai; the author of “T.S. Eliot” as editor; the editor of “Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English”; and his poems appear regularly in such publications as The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, and Yale Review. He is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships and a Pushcart Prize.

Biographical Update

Agha Shahid Ali died on Dec. 8, 2001. His last book, “Rooms Are Never Finished,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. A posthumous collection of English ghazals, “Call Me Ishmael Tonight,” was published in 2003. His work has also been featured in the 2006 anthology American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets. The Veiled Suite, his collected poems, appeared in 2009. The University of Utah Press awards the annual Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize in memory of Ali.