Tamim Ansary
Encyclopedia
Afghan American
An Afghan American refers to an American with heritage or origins in Afghanistan.-History and population:Afghan Americans have a long history of immigrating to the United States, as they may have arrived as early as the 1920s...
author and public speaker. He is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York, a book published shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and is a columnist
Columnist
A columnist is a journalist who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions. Columns appear in newspapers, magazines and other publications, including blogs....
for the encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
website Encarta
Encarta
Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
.
Early life and education
Ansary was born in AfghanistanAfghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
and lived there until high school when he won a scholarship to Colorado Rocky Mountain School
Colorado Rocky Mountain School
Colorado Rocky Mountain School , founded in 1953, is a coeducational boarding and day school in Carbondale, Colorado, USA. CRMS educates roughly 160 students in grades 9 through 12...
, an American boarding school
Boarding school
A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...
. He attended Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
in Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
. Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
.
Writer and lecturer on Afghanistan
Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he penned a widely circulated e-mailE-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
that denounced the Taliban and called on the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to bring political change to Afghanistan. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age
Stone Age
The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...
."
His book West of Kabul, East of New York is a literary memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. West of Kabul, East of New York was San Francisco's One City One Book
One City One Book
One City One Book is a generic name for a community reading program that attempts to get everyone in a city to read and discuss the same book. The name of the program is often reversed to One Book One City, or is customized to name the city where it occurs...
selection for 2008. Ansary also edited and published a group of essays by young Afghans entitled, Snapshots: This Afghan American Life with funding from a 2008 grant from the Christianson Fund.
In the middle of 2008 Ansary gave a series of lectures to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes
Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes offer noncredit courses with no assignments or grades to “seasoned” adults over age 50. Since 2001 philanthropist Bernard Osher has made grants from his foundation to launch OLLI programs at over 120 universities and colleges in 49 states and the District of...
, associated with San Francisco State University, on the history and development of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
. This series was rebroadcast on the local affiliate of National Public Radio [KALW].
Ansary's novel The Widow's Husband portrays the nineteenth-century British invasion of Afghanistan from both an Afghan and a British perspective.
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes was published in spring of 2009 by Public Affairs Books. This book won the 2010 Northern California book award, General Nonfiction category. Mir Tamim moderates the San Francisco Writers Workshop
San Francisco Writers Workshop
The San Francisco Writers Workshop is one of the oldest continuously running writing critique groups in the United States, meeting every Tuesday night, except for major holidays, since 1946...
in attempt to give back to younger writers what was given to him when young.
Tamim Ansary lives in San Francisco with his wife. They have two daughters.