Hosam Aboul-Ela teaches in the department of English and the program in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has lived most of his life in two exotic foreign countries—Egypt and Texas. He is the English translator of the novels Voices by Soleiman Fayyad and Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid. He is also the author of a critical/theoretical text entitled Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition. He spent the spring of 2008 in Cairo, Egypt as a CASA III/Fulbright fellow.