Samar Habib is a visiting professor at San Francisco State and an affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley, researching gender and sexual minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. She received her doctorate from the University of Sydney in 2007 and worked as a tenured lecturer in Islamic and Gender Studies before coming to the United States to continue to teach and research in her area of expertise. Habib is the author of several academic works, including Female Homosexuality in the Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2007 & 2009) and Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality (New York: Teneo, 2009). She is the translator of I Am You (New York: Cambria, 2008) and the editor of Islam and Homosexuality (Oxford: Praeger, 2010). Shorter academic works appear or are forthcoming in EnterText, ISIM Review, History of Feminist Thought and LGBT Transnational Identities. She is an editorial board member of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature; the chief-editor of Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship; and the co-founder and publisher of African Nebula (edited by Dr. Olukoya Ogen) and nebu[lab] (edited by Dr. Michael Angelo Tata). Her creative works include the novel A Tree Like Rain and the chapbook Islands in Space. Her poetry and fiction have also appeared in Arabesques, Joussour, The Liquid Mirror and nebu[lab]. Her latest novel, Living Close to Mecca, a ficto-historical work set in ninth century Baghdad, is currently under consideration for publication.