The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English.
Descartes’ Nightmare is the 2007 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, Cole Swenson, of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Susan McCabe is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her other books include Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film; Swirl; and Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. Her poetry has been published in The Kenyon Review, GLQ, and American Poetry Review.