[1] She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997.
At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
She won the 2009 Banipal Prize for her translation of Yahya Taher Abdullah's The Collar and the Bracelet.
[2] She has also translated Neighborhood and Boulevard: Reading through the Modern Arab City by the Lebanese writer Khaled Ziadeh, and Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian Between Moscow and Chernobyl by Mohamed Makhzangi.
Future releases include a translation of Miral al-Tahawy's Brooklyn Heights (end of 2011).