Michael Sells is a professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He is an authority on Ibn al-'Arabī as well as one of the most distinguished contemporary translators of classical Arabic poetry. His books include: Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes (Wesleyan); Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago); Early Islamic Mysticism (Paulist Press); The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (California); Approaching the Qur'an (White Cloud); and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Andalus (Cambridge). He is currently working on a complete bilingual edition and translation of Ibn al-'Arabī's Tarjuman al-Ashwaq.