Michael Beard teaches in the English Department at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of a book on the Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat, Hedayat’s Blind Owl and the West (1990), and has translated from Persian two volumes of short poems by Abbas Kiarostami, Walking with the Wind (with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, 2001), and A Wolf Lying in Wait / Gorgi dar kamin (with the late Karim Emami, 2005). He frequently collaborates with Adnan Haydar on translations of Arabic poetry, including Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (BOA Editions, 2008); they are coeditors of The Middle East Translation Series for Syracuse University Press.