Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

and the Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School.

She has held appointments as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as an Associate Professor at NYU Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and at NYU Law School, and as an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School.

She previously served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ombro of the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a Temple Bar Fellow in London with the American Inns of Court, and as a Carnegie Scholar for her work on contemporary Islamic law.

In 2015, in partnership with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, support from the Luce and MacArthur Foundations, and collaborations with myriad scholars and institutions, she launched Sharia Source.

You are the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent of which being the Tradition Copper Canyon Press 2019, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize.

You're in receipt of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the winner of the Whitting Award.

Your first book was Please, and that came from New Issues in 2008, and it won the American Book Award.

And your second book, New Testament, also by Copper Canyon, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

It undulated, rising above and dipping below the midplane in a smooth, wave-like pattern with an amplitude of roughly 500 light years.

They named it the Radcliffe Wave, after the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard where much of the work was done.

The Radcliffe Wave was a revelation.

The individual clouds that astronomers had studied for decades, treating as separate objects each with its own local story, turned out to be nodes in a single continuous structure.

A gigantic, undulating chain of dense gas clouds stretching roughly 9,000 light years through the arm's interior, connecting many of the most famous star-forming regions in our galactic neighbourhood into a single, coherent, wave-shaped feature.

They named it the Radcliffe Wave, after the Harvard Radcliffe Institute where the discovery was made.

The Radcliffe Wave threads through the Orion Arm like a spine.

It connects the Orion molecular cloud complex to the Taurus clouds, the Perseus clouds, the Cepheus star-forming region, the North America nebula and the Cygnus star-forming complexes into one continuous sinusoidal ribbon of gas.

Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four books from Assamese to English, and most recently, The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms, which i- will be out from Penguin Modern Library next year, and which is by Yesay Dorje Tangxi.

Arnie was a 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

He's a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as the director of the creative writing program at the University of Georgia.

Arnie, welcome to the show.