Agha Shahid Ali

• Name — Agha Shahid Ali • Birth Name — Agha Shahid Ali • Born — 4 February 1949 • Birthplace — New Delhi, India • Relatives — Agha Ashraf Ali (Father) Prof. Agha Iqbal Ali (brother) Prof. Hena Ahmad, Prof. Sameetah Agha (Sisters) Agha Shaukat Ali (Uncle) Begum Zaffar Ali (Grandmother) • Died — 8 December 2001 • Resting Place — Bridge Street Cemetery Northampton, Hampshire County, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA • Education — * University of Kashmir • University of Delhi • University of Arizona (MFA) • Pennsylvania State University (PhD) • Credits — The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished and The Rebel's Silhouette • Occupation — Poet, Professor • Awards — Pushcart Prize, National Book Award 2001, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada (1996)

Agha Shahid Ali was born on 4 February 1949, in New Delhi in the Union of India, into an illustrious Qizilbashi Agha family from Srinagar, Kashmir, tracing their roots back to Kandahar, Afghanistan. He grew up in Jammu and Kashmir, where his family was from, and in Indiana, where his parents studied. Shahid's father Agha Ashraf Ali was a renowned educationist. His grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir. Shahid was educated at the Burn Hall School, later University of Kashmir and Hindu College, University of Delhi. He permanently moved to the United States in 1976. He earned a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and the United States. Shahid was born a Shia Muslim, but his upbringing was secular. Shahid and his brother Iqbal both studied at an Irish Catholic parochial school and, in an interview, he recalled that: "There was never a hint of any kind of parochialism in the home."

Ali expressed his love and concern for his people in In Memory of Begum Akhtar and The Country Without a Post Office, which was written with the Kashmir conflict as a backdrop. He was a translator of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems), and editor for the Middle East and Central Asia segment of Jeffery Paine's Poetry of Our World. He also compiled the volume Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals, and his poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and other anthologies. Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College as well as at creative writing programs at SUNY-Binghamton, University of Utah, Baruch College, Warren Wilson College, Hamilton College and New York University. J&K authorities have removed three poems – "Postcard from Kashmir", "In Arabic" and "The Last Saffron" from the curriculum of University of Kashmir and two poems, "I see Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight" and "Call me Ishmael Tonight" from the Cluster University. Education advisors in Delhi/Srinagar have maintained that such "Resistance Literature" sustains "secessionist mindset, aspiration & narrative" among students.

Ali was gay and never married. He died of brain cancer in December 2001 and was buried in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to his beloved poet Emily Dickinson.

• Bone Sculpture (1972), • In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), • The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), • A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), • A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), • The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), • The Country Without a Post Office (1997), • Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), • Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003), • The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems, (2009) • Final Collections. (2004)

• Translator, The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), • Editor, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).