Dr. Muhammad Mahdi Nasser al-Din, born in Sajd, South Lebanon, in 1977, holds a PhD in medical physics from the University of François-Rabelais, Tours, France, after ten years of teaching at the American University of Beirut. He is currently a professor at the Lebanese University. He has published seven poetry collections in Arabic and one in French, and has translated books from French into Arabic, including works by Marcela Eliade and Jean Bottero, and has re-edited works by the renowned Syrian scholar Muhammad Kurd Ali. He is a senior editor of the cultural supplement Kalimat, the cultural newsletter of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.