Khaled Al-Masri earned his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MA and BA in Arabic Language and Literature from Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan. His translations of contemporary Arabic poetry and short fiction have appeared in multiple literary journals in the United States and the United Kingdom.  He has translated two books from Arabic into English:  Between Sips of Coffee:  Oral Narratives from the United Arab Emirates (2014) and Houses of God:  From the Great Mosque of Qayrawan to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (forthcoming, Spring 2015).  He is editor of a forthcoming anthology of Arabic short stories, published by Penguin.

Al-Masri has also published a book in Arabic on the fiction of prominent Iraqi author Gha’ib Tu’mah Faraman. Additionally, he has edited twelve Arabic translations of English-language novels, including Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The Known World by Edward P. Jones.  

His dissertation, which he is currently developing into a book, is called Telling Stories of Pain:  Women Writing Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War.  It  discusses post-war novels by Lebanese female authors such as Alawiyya Subuh, Hanan al-Shaykh and Najwa Barakat.  Al-Masri's other interests include twentieth-century Arabic literature, nineteenth-century intellectual history of the Arab world, gender studies, war narratives, and literary and translation theory.