French Soup Alchemy

Ali Shakir is the author of A Muslim on the Bridge: On Being an Iraqi-Arab Muslim in the Twenty-First Century (Signal 8 Press, 2013) and Café Fayrouz (a novel in Arabic; Arab Scientific Publishers, 2015). A graduate of Baghdad University, he co-founded L’Atelier Art Gallery in 1995 where he exhibited his artwork along with the work of other young Iraqis. Since leaving Iraq in 2006, he has published articles and essays in newspapers and literary journals in the Arab world, England, the United States, and New Zealand, where he now lives.