I am a fledgling essayist, poet, and playwright as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Arabic Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. I have also lived in London and New York and worked in publishing and bookselling. My academic work focuses on abstraction, metaphor, and imagination in Arabic poetics, classical and modern. My literary essays have previously appeared in The Point (https://thepointmag.com/2016/criticism/now-they-were-corpses) and Vol. 1 Brooklyn (http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2014/06/18/pressing/).