Afsar Mohammad teaches in the Department of South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Afsar is an award-winning/ published poet in English and his home language of Telugu—a south Indian language. He has published five volumes of poetry in Telugu and his English poetry will be out soon. He has also published a monograph with the Oxford University Press (USA, 2013) with a title “The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India.” He is currently working on a new book with a focus on the history of Muslims in the city of Hyderabad, India.