Ali
Jimale Ahmed holds an M.A. in African Area Studies
and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA). Poet, cultural critic, short-story writer, and scholar, Ahmed
is Professor and former chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College of
the City University of New York, where he also teaches for the Africana Studies
Program and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages
and Cultures; he is also on the Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY
Graduate center. His books include The Invention of Somalia (1995), Daybreak
Is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia (1996), Fear
Is a Cow (2002), Diaspora Blues
(2005), The Road Less Traveled:
Reflections on the Literatures of the Horn of Africa (2008, coedited with
the late Taddesse Adera), When Donkeys
Give Birth to Calves: Totems, Wars, Horizons, Diasporas (2012) and Gaso, Ganuun iyo Gasiin (a novel) (2018;
roughly translated as “Kraal, Milk, Sustenance”). His poetry and short stories
have been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Danish,
Bosnian, Portuguese, and Turkish. He has given lectures on topics that include
African literature, September 11 and its impact on Afro-Arab relations, on
poetry, politics, and peace, on religion, pluralism and the secular state, on
African democracy and identity, on Somali Diaspora, on the role of the
intellectual in nation building, on cultural constructions of gender in Somali
literature and history, and on literature and conflict in Africa. His lecture
tours have taken him to several universities in Canada, Japan, Italy, Finland,
and the U.S. Ahmed has been invited as expert speaker to the U.S. State
Department, the United Nations, the United States Institute of Peace, and the
U.S National Academy of Sciences.