Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary's College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

“Ali, author of the novel Quinn’s Passage, reveals a rich and daring poetic voice in his first book of poetry. If one of the poet’s tasks is to revive the mythological powers in things, Ali does so skillfully here.”
—Library Journal

“The young T.S. Eliot’s personae in “Gerontion” and other pre-Waste Land poems resonate in Ali’s work, but unlike the studies impersonality and austerity of Eliot, Ali has a vibrant and generous personality that lets one hear the inner music that makes us remember what it is to be human.”
—Painted Bride Quarterly

“The Far Mosque by Kazim Ali is a book in which the author has managed to render into the English language the universal inner voice. These poems talk to the reader from the realm in which we are all human. What a poet to be able to define spirit using the American vocabulary! These poems, so very different from my own, speak clearly to me. What a gift!”
—Lucille Clifton

“Kazim Ali’s poems feel both ancient and entirely new, marrying the old Persian tradition of discontinuity to the rapid shifts of postmodern disjunction. This is a first collection of genuine originality and strange distinction, each poem a fragment of the deep notation of one ‘not listening to the music, but to the door.’”
—Mark Doty

“There is a metaphysical feel to this poetry that renders it fit for our globalized age, a geography underwritten by the loss of fixed abode, so that the journey, shifting in all its elements becomes all there is to hold onto. Any resting place reached must be renounced and a future shorn of permanence comes into being, a cliff climb, a strenuous hovering that permits sense to appear.”
—Meena Alexander in American Poet