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Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737    Passcode: 678146

Ahmad Almallah holds a Ph.D. in Classical Arabic Poetry from Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, working on writing a book on Arabic love poetry and the ghazal. He held the position of Assistant Professor of Arabic and Arabic Literature at Middlebury College and left that position to move to Philadelphia with his wife and daughter in 2014. Since then he has found inspiration in Philadelphia to work on writing poetry and has been involved with the Arab arts and education organization, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, in West Philadelphia. He is currently managing their project “Words Adorned: Andalusian Poetry and Music.”

Grant Clauser is the author of five books, most recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award) and Reckless Constellations (winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, The Literary Review, The Journal, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review and others. He was the 2010 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, has been a presenter at numerous writing conferences and a guest speaker at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates. He received his MFA from Bowling Green State University where he was a Richard Devine Fellow. He is a senior editor at the New York Times’ Wirecutter and teaches poetry classes at Rosemont College