BIOGRAPHY
Eric Ormsby (b. 1941) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Florida. He attended Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude in Oriental Studies (1971). He went on to earn a masters degree in Library Science at Rutgers (1978), then attended Princeton, where he earned a doctorate (1981) in Near Eastern Studies, specializing in Islamic theology and Classical Arabic language and literature. Among other scholarly works, Ormsby is the author of Theodicy in Islamic Thought (1984).

Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has written three poetry collections, Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year, Coastlines (1992), and For a Modest God: New & Selected Poems (1997). His poems have also been published in various Canadian and American journals. Ormsby resides in Montreal, where he is a professor at McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies.