Eric Ormsby was born in Atlanta, Georgia. A distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic thought, he received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and taught at McGill University, Montreal for twenty years, where from 1996 he was Professor and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. In 2005 he moved to London where he took up a post as Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. In addition to his extensive writing on Classical Arabic literature and Islamic thought, and his translations from Arabic and Persian, he has published six poetry collections and is an essayist and reviewer and the author of two critical works on poetry and translation. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Paris Review and PN Review and are included in The Norton Anthology of Poetry.