Wessam Elmeligi is Assistant Professor, Director of the Center for Arab American Studies, and Director of the Comparative Literature Certificate and Arabic Translation Certificate at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research includes Arabic and comparative literature, art, and cinema. He is working on a project of Arab poetics, formulating the-oretical frameworks to examine Arabic literature. In this project, he has published two books. The first is The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia, a critical anthology of Arab women poets which unpacks Arab women's classical poetry as a poetics of rejection. The second book is Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return, which examines Arabic migration narratives as a poetics of return. He is also a graphic novel artist and author, and has published two graphic novels, Y and Y, and Jamila.