Short Version: Descended from Arabs and Irishmen.  Born in Detroit.  Writer, poet, teacher, curmudgeon.  Live with my wife and kids in Brooklyn.

Long Version: I was born in 1975 in Detroit, Michigan to leftist parents of Lebanese/Egyptian/Irish/Polish descent.  My mother was an irrepressible activist who worked in a hospital and my father was a merchant marine and factory worker turned community organizer.  I grew up in a huge, colorful family, blocks from Detroit proper in working-class Dearborn, the town that Henry Ford built.  My youth was spent in the shadow of Ford’s by-then-decaying River Rouge plant, the first of America’s truly monstrous car factories, immortalized in Diego Rivera’s masterpiece Detroit Industry, and in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night.

By the early 1980s, Dearborn was also rapidly, if reluctantly, becoming home to the country’s largest concentration of Arab Americans.  The racism this aroused in some of the town’s white residents stays with me to this day:  The man who was mayor for most of my youth got elected using brochures bemoaning “the Arab problem.”  There were board of education meetings full of screaming white parents trying to prevent Arab kids from being bussed into “their” schools.  The Arab American community center that my father helped found was burned to the ground twice by arsonists.  Twice.

I was a (comic) bookish kid – wimpy, wheezy, hated sports and the outdoors.  With the exception of a few great teachers my lower-middle-tier public school education was a pretty useless mélange of bullying and apathy.  Luckily for me, my parents were consummate learners who insisted upon intellectual curiosity and kept tons of books around.  I thumbed through these books enough to open my world up, but most of my reading involved Marvel Comics and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks.  If I have any sort of respectable vocabulary, I owe it to Stan Lee and Gary Gygax!

By the time high school rolled around I was spending more and more time hanging out in Detroit’s roughneck-bohemian Cass Corridor.  I met my first girlfriends and did more than my share of various hallucinogens. I got a part-time job at the local library — my first bit of employment that didn’t involve a paper route or working for one of my many uncles.  While I was still obsessed with comics and RPG books, my reading list expanded to include Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Naguib Mahfouz, Malcolm X, and Leo Tolstoy.  Somehow I managed not to flunk out of high school, though it was pretty close.

After graduating, I continued to work at the library while simultaneously taking classes at Henry Ford Community College.  To this day I’ll pontificate loudly to anyone who’ll listen regarding the importance of community colleges.  I never would have gone on to more advanced study had I not been taught at HFCC that school could be fulfilling.

At this point (the mid-1990s) I also began to write poetry seriously.  I was lucky enough to be nurtured in this by an older guard of Detroit poets, many of them coming from a Black Arts Movement aesthetic, who were incredibly welcoming to younger voices.  My participation in this community eventually led to my becoming a member of Detroit’s National Poetry Slam team.  Traveling around the country to read as a part of this team confirmed what I had suspected for years – that I wanted to spend my life working with words.

To that end, upon completing my associate’s degree at HFCC I transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  U of M was disorienting at first.  In the years to come I’d learn that Michigan is only prestigious “for a state school.”  But as far as I knew at the time, it might as well have been Yale.  I’d never met anyone who’d grown up with a nanny before, or who used “summer” as a verb.  A certain amount of class resentment ensued.  More importantly, though, for the first time I made friends who were not from Detroit or Lebanon!  People from exotic places like Brooklyn and Oakland!

Two years of horizon expanding ensued.  I learned what hard but rewarding academic work was like.  I got heavily involved in anti-sweatshop and anti-sanctions activism, helping to stage a sit-in at the University President’s office that helped force the University to stop licensing athletic wear made in sweatshops.  Between semesters, and in the year following my obtaining a BA (with High Honors!) in American Studies, I visited New York, Europe, and the Middle East for the first time.  Each of these visits changed me.

I also began to publish poems here and there, and to read more deeply in the canon.  I started to appreciate the uses of formal training in literature.  This led me to research MFAs, and I eventually landed at Brooklyn College’s excellent poetry program.  The piece of paper I received when I was through is pretty close to worthless, employment-wise.  Still, it’s hard to overstate how lucky I was to have spent two years reading and writing poetry, teaching at a leisurely pace, and exploring New York City from my insanely cheap room in a crowded Harlem apartment.

Apparently a glutton for graduate-level punishment, I then spent the next couple of years getting a more traditional MA in English — with a specialization in eighteenth-century British literature, of all things — at Rutgers University, where I also teach  writing.

In the past few years I’ve also left the gray of uptown Manhattan for the relative green of Brooklyn, and have left the joys and pains of poetry writing and academic research to focus on the joys and pains of writing fantasy fiction.  I was a part of the 2007 Taos Toolbox and 2009 Rio Hondo workshops and am currently a member of the Altered Fluid writers’ group.  I am represented by Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

In 2007 I was lucky enough to marry songwriter/research psychologist extraordinaire Hayley Thompson.  In 2010 I became a proud father to twins Naima and Malcolm.

For a list of my published work, please see the bibliography.  If you are a human and not a robot, you can write me at saladinahmed [at] hotmail [dot] com .  If you’re an evil genius robot that likes my writing and is clever enough to figure out that address, you can write me too.  That would actually be kind of awesome.