Born February 4, 1949, in New Delhi, India, Agha Shahid Ali was raised in Kashmir in a sophisticated, enlightened, and culturally rich Muslim household. His father, Agha Ashraf Ali, was a well-known educator in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. Ali, who grew up speaking Urdu, Kashmiri, and English, attended an Irish Catholic school in Kashmir and later earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Kashmir, in Srinagar. He took his master's degree in English from the University of Delhi and, after immigrating to the United States in 1976, took a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984. In 1985, he received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona.

Ali wrote his first poem, in English, at the age of twelve, though he claims Urdu as his mother tongue. Because the British colonized India, he considers English a South Asian language...