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Biographies of Contributors

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QADI ‘IYAD, was born in 476 AH/1083 CE in Sabta (Ceuta), Andalusia. He was a qadi or judge and faqih (jurist) of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, serving in both Morocco and Spain. He authored several works on various Islamic topics, but he is best known for his Kitab al-Shifa’ bi-ta’rif huquq al-Mustafa, a devotional biography that is arguably the most popular work on the Prophet Muhammad in the Islamic tradition. Qadi ‘Iyad was also an accomplished poet. His biographers describe him as a prolific writer of poetry, although little of his work has been transmitted. What is extant was collected and preserved by his family members and close associates. ‘Iyad’s poetry reflects his personal religious experiences, and, as such, much of it is written in the first person. What is most revealing about ‘Iyad’s poetry is his piety, which he manifests through intense and descriptive supplications, calling on God in dire need. The poems included in this volume constitute the first attempt to translate the poetical works of this great eleventh-century Muslim figure into English.

ROCÍO QESPI (ROCÍO QUISPE-AGNOLI) is Assistant Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Latin American Studies at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State University. She is also Core Faculty of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women in Development. She earned a MA in Sciences du Langage in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toulouse II, and an AM and PhD in Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She has received several research grants and fellowships from the Taiwan Government, Spain’s Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional, Brown University, the Newberry Library, the Universidad de Salamanca, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos de Sevilla. La fe indigena en la escritura: asimilacion y resistencia en los Andes coloniales (Lima: Universidad de San Marcos Press, 2006) led to public presentations/interviews on Peru’s NPR and TV. In 2006 she also edited a special issue of Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Hispanicos y Linguistica entitled Beyond the Convent: Colonial Women’s Voices and Daily Challenges in Spanish America. As a writer of short fiction, she has received the Atenea literary award (Salamanca, Spain 1999) for El cementerio de Acari, also the first finalist in the Ana Maria Matute Literary Competition (Madrid, Spain 1999). It has been published in the collection Ellas tambien cuentan (Madrid: Torremozas, 2001). El cuarto mandamiento received La Regenta literary award for short fiction (Salamanca 1999) and it has been published in Writing Towards Hope (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). A collection of her short stories is slated to be published in Peru (Mundo Ajeno).

SALVATORE QUASIMODO (1901-1968) was a prolific poet, writer, critic, and translator, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959.

MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM has taught at universities in Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh and the US, and is currently professor of English at International Islamic University Malaysia. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, including One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in English (Marshall Cavendish, 2007) and Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism (Peter Lang, 2004). His scholarly articles and translated works have appeared in leading literary journals the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, India and Malaysia.

ANTERO DE QUENTAL (1842-1891) born in the Azores, he studied at Coimbra and was central in introducing socialist ideas to Portugal. The leading figure of the so-called Generation of the Seventies, he relied on the classical form of the sonnet to give order to an inner life threatened with chaos.

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645) was the leading satirist of Spain’s Golden Age.

MARIO QUINTANA (1906-1994) was born in 1906 in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil. Author of more than twenty volumes of poetry and a regular newspaper contributor, Quintana was—and continues to be—one of the most beloved poets of Brazil.