Bilal Shaw, is a Kashmiri scientist working in quantum information science who completed his PhD at the University of Southern California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation and nanotechnology, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. He is currently working as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego, where he applies machine-learning techniques to build statistical risk models for fraud and credit space. He is also an accomplished poet.
Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797 – 1869), known by his pen name, Ghalib, is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire in India. His poems are characterized by great wit, puns, and a mystical, erotic imagery so passionate as to veer at times into the surreal. He is the acknowledged world master of the ghazal, though certain Persian poets such as Hafiz and Rumi give him a run for his money!
Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College and author of fifteen books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His poetry books include Beast in the Apartment,Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, The Golem of Los Angeles, Sad Jazz: Sonnets,Impure, and selected poems in Spanish, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, and he dabbles in other languages.