Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya, destroyed during the 1948 war. The owner of a souvenir shop in Nazareth, he is the author of five books of poetry in Arabic and of So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (Copper Canyon Press, 2006). His biography, by Adina Hoffman, is entitled My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.