Bibliography
Basu, Lopamudra. “The Poet in the Public Sphere: a
conversation with Meena Alexander.” Social Text
20, no. 3 (2002): 31.
Dave, Shilpa. “The Doors to Home and History:
Post-Colonial Identities in Meena Alexander and
Bharati Mukherjee.” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 3
(1993): 103–11.
Duncan, Erika. “A Portrait of Meena Alexander.”
World Literature Today 73 (1999): 23–28.
Knight, Denise. “Meena Alexander.” In Writers of In-
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Asma Sayed
Ali, Agha Shahid (1949–2001)
Poet Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri American born
in New Delhi and raised in Kashmir, is best known
for his dedication to educating the American pub-
lic on a Persian form of poetry called the ghazal.
Educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar,
and the University of Delhi, he earned his Ph.D.
from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and his
M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.
Ali received fellowships from the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Con-
ference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New
York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim
Foundation, and he was awarded a Pushcart Prize.
He held teaching positions at the University of
Delhi, Pennsylvania State University, SUNY Bing-
hamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College,
Baruch College, University of Utah, the M.F.A.
program at Warren Wilson College and at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts–Amherst.
In his poetry collections such as The Half-Inch
Himalayas and A Nostalgist’s Map of America, Ali
revives the elegiac voice of poetry to propose that
all love or pain is the same regardless of circum-
stances. In Rooms Are Never Finished, a finalist for
the National Book Award in 2001 and the publi-
cation that won him the Pulitzer Prize, Ali speaks
eloquently about his relationship with his mother
and the grief of her death through the use of son-
nets, ghazals, prose poems, and Sapphics. His sev-
enth book of poetry, The Country without a Post
Office, evokes nostalgia as Ali reminisces about his
hometown of Kashmir. A posthumous collection,
entitled Call Me Ishmael Tonight, was published by
W.W. Norton in 2003.
He translated the work of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a
prominent Urdu poet and student of various tra-
ditions of classical poetry, in a book titled The
Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems. Ali also edited
the anthology Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals
in English. This anthology introduced the seventh-
century poetic form, the ghazal, and Ali dedicated
himself to explaining the true elements of the
ghazal through the work of contemporary Ameri-
can poets such as Annie Finch, Marilyn Hacker,
John Hollander, and Paul Muldoon. It was Ali's
belief that attention should be paid to the tradi-
tional model of the ghazal, though he did appre-
ciate many of the qualities of the Americanized
version. Agha Shahid Ali died in December 2001
of brain cancer, an illness he discounted as merely
an aside to his life.
Anne Marie FowlerAli, Samina (1969– )
Born in India, Samina Ali moved to the United
States as an infant but spent childhood summers in
India, learning about her Indian-Muslim heritage.
This divided existence developed in Ali a sense of
inverted duality, for while she was in India, she felt
like an American, and while in the United States,
like an Indian. When an arranged marriage took
her to India, where one strife-ridden election night
she and her family awaited attack by militant Hin-
dus, Ali vowed to live her life independently, not
by the dictates of parents, culture, and religion.
She returned to America, changed majors, got an
M.F.A. in creative writing, and became a writer.
Madras on Rainy Days (2004) is semiautobio-
graphical and relates the experiences of Layla, a 19-
year-old Indian-Muslim woman who is pressured
into an arranged marriage to Sameer, a handsome,
rebellious biker who is looking to exorcize theAli, Samina 9