Alexander Selimov

Biography

Dr. Alexander Selimov is the Elias Ahuja Chair and Professor of Spanish & Latin American Studies. His scholarship focuses on the intersection between literary and cultural studies. He teaches literature, language, and culture, including interdisciplinary courses on Romanticism, theater and poetry, autobiography, identity fashioning, memory, history, and music in the Hispanic world.

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Selimov is an award-winning poet and singer-songwriter. He has received numerous accolades, ranging from the 1983 International Songwriters Festival in Kazan (USSR) to the 2018 Victoria Urbano honorable mention for poetry (Chicago), as well as a Silver medal at the 2019 LIFFT Eurasian literary competition (Baku). Dr. Selimov's poetry has appeared in Spanish, English, Russian, Azeri, and Chinese. He holds the title of "Universal Ambassador of Culture" awarded by the Bolivian Association of Writers and Artists with the UNESCO recognition. For his international contribution to the Arts and Humanities, Dr. Selimov has been awarded honorary memberships in the Association of Artists and Writers of Bolivia and in the Association of Writers of Azerbaijan.

"Dr. Alexander Selimov's poetry oscillates, in this book, between crisis and the recovery of intimacy, between absence and presence, between the past and the present, between the "you" and the self, and between companionship and loneliness. We are in the presence of one of the most authentic voices in the panorama of contemporary poetry in Spanish which, as an added merit, has fully integrated into a linguistic community and a cultural identity far removed from its origins." —Ángel Esteban, University of Granada.

“Alexander Selimov writes beautiful poetry that blows you away. I was struck in particular by lines like "Me resigno a renacer en mí" and "No cuento con la permanencia," and of course the poems themselves to which these lines belong. "No cuento con la permanencia" is one of the loveliest poems in the collection, for its near Machadian brevity and depth. Anyone who can be compared to Machado, one of the great poets in any language, is no slouch” — Noel Valis, Yale University.

"The poetry of Alexander Selimov is inserted into a tradition that transcends cultural, national, and linguistic boundaries and opens up to a different sensibility and an epistemology of poetic reality from an identity that can only be defined as a handful of sand in a closed fist that escapes through the cracks between the fingers. Ventanas a otros cuerpos has, from another unsuspected perspective, a new line of inquiry about those diffuse identities characteristic of today's global contexts." — Amauri Gutiérrez Coto, Lafayette University

Degrees

• PhD., Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania 1996
• M.A., Hispanic Studies, University of Delaware 1993
• B.A. & M.A., French, English & Literary Studies, Lenin State University, Russian Federation, 1986.