Qais Akbar Omar holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–15. Qais is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has published short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, The Markaz Review, Guernica, Arrowsmith, Literary Hub, American Chordata, and elsewhere.