The Half-Inch Himalayas is a stellar collection of early work by the poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). His most recent volumes of poetry are Rooms Are Never Finished and The Country Without a Post Office. He is also the editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English.

AGHA SHAHID ALI was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He earned a Ph. D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. His other volumes of poetry include Rooms are never finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also the author of T.S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan, 2000).
Ali Received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.