Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Egyptian Oral Epic Tradition (1995) and Arab Folklore (2007), co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), and co-editor of The Garland Encyclopedia of Word Music: The Middle East (2002).