Qais Akbar Omar (whose first name is pronounced “Kice”) is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers (FSG) which has been published in over twenty languages. Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University. He studied business at Brandeis University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado. In 2014-15 he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University. For the 2012 anthology, That Mad Game: Growing up in a War Zone, Omar contributed the lead essay, “A Talib In Love,” presently under film option. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Sunday Times in London, The Globe and Mail in Canada, and the Cairo Review of Foreign Affairs, The Southern Review, Agni among others. He is the co-author, with Stephen Landrigan, of Shakespeare in Kabul.