Born in Damascus, Syria in 1968 and now living in Chicago, Osama Alomar is one of the most well-respected Arabic poets writing today, and a prominent practitioner of the Arabical-qisa al-qasira jiddan, the “very short story.” He was a City of Asylum writer-in-residence from 2017-2019. He is the author of Fullblood Arabian in English, and three collections of short stories and a volume of poetry in Arabic. Alomar’s first full-length collection of stories, The Teeth of the Comb,  was published by New Directions in April 2017. His short stories have been published in Newyorker.com, Noon, Conjuctions.com, The Coffin Factory, Electric Literature, and The Literary Review.