Reza Aslan, was born in Tehran, Iran in 1972 and left in 1979 during the revolution to come to the United States. Aslan has degrees from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and is currently a Doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at The University of California at Santa Barbara. Until recently, he was both Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Iowa and Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction. He has lectured extensively on the Middle East, and has published numerous articles on the religion and politics of the Middle East.

In 1998 Reza Aslan was elected president of Harvard’s chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a United Nations organization committed to the cause of global understanding. In that capacity, Aslan brought U.N. Deputy Secretary Denis Halliday to Harvard for his first public appearance since resigning his post as the Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq in protest of sanctions. His speech received national attention and sparked a worldwide speaking tour. In 1999 after the consecutive nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, the W.C.R.P. under Aslan’s leadership brought the ambassadors of the two countries to Harvard in order to discuss for the first time their shared nuclear future. His work with W.C.R.P. led to a position as legislative assistant for the Friend’s Committee on National Legislation in D.C., where Aslan worked as a liaison to Congress on issues of arms control and the Middle East.

In August of 2000, Aslan was named Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Iowa, becoming the first full-time professor of Islam in the history of the state. In that capacity, he taught courses in Introduction to Islam, Gender and Human Rights, and Religion and Politics in the Middle East, as well as supervising theses in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Women’s Movement in Iran, and Gender Violence Laws in Pakistan.

When the Pentagon and World Trade Center was attacked in September of 2001, Aslan put his expertise of the Middle East to work for both the University and the greater Iowa community by traveling throughout the state speaking to public and private organizations, businesses, churches, mosques, and universities. His efforts in Iowa received national attention in such periodicals as U.S.A. Today, U.S. News and World Report, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2003, Aslan left his post at the University of Iowa to concentrate full-time on writing. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Slate Magazine, Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Nation. He has appeared on Meet The Press, Hardball, The Daily Show, and Nightline. No God but God is his first book.

Jack Miles: MacArthur Fellow (2002-2007), Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty Trust, and visiting scholar at Occidental College, is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese. A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God was published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Brazilian translations are in progress or in print.

Over a period of nearly twenty years, 1975-1995, Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, executive editor at the University of California Press, literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and finally a member of the Times Editorial Board, writing on politics and culture. He is Senior Fellow with the Pacific Council on International Policy, serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and is general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Miles has been Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Caltech, Director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, Regents Lecturer at the University of California, and Visiting Fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, University of Chicago.

Born in Chicago in 1942, he spent the years 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, 1964-1966, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1966-1967, before enrolling at Harvard University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. He is fluent in several modern languages.

Miles served as a member of the nonfiction jury for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, he chaired the jury for the Irish Times International Fiction award. He was the founding director and for seven years the jury chair of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards at the Claremont Graduate University. Miles is a past president of the National Book Critics Circle, and an advisory board member of PEN Center USA West.

www.JackMiles.com