Jaroslav Stetkevych was born in Burkaniv, Ukraine on 25 April, 1929. He began his secondary school studies at the Statsgymnasium in Göttingen and completed secondary school at the Ukrainian Gymnasium at Berchtesgaden, Germany in 1947 and the German Gymnasium in Munich, 1949. He began his university studies at the University of Madrid where he received the Licenciatura in Semitic Philology with Premio Extraordinario honors in 1959. During that time (1957-58) he studied in the PhD program at Cairo University. In 1959 he received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to pursue PhD studies in the department of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. There he studied Arabic Literature under Sir Hamilton Gibb and received his PhD in 1962. He taught Modern and Classical Arabic literature and Classical Arabic syntax in the NELC department at the University of Chicago from 1962-96. He is currently a Research Associate at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych.Stetkevych’s research interests and publications span both Classical and Modern Arabic Language and Literature, with his deepest involvement in Arabic poetry. His work on Arabic linguistics and philology grows from his 1970 book The Modern Arabic Literary Language to include studies ranging from contemporary Arabic language on stage to the hermeneutics of Classical Qur’ānic exegetical terminology and the poetics and semiotics of animal nomenclature in the classical qaṣīdah. In the field of Arabic poetry, his major contribution is to the study of the lyricism and aesthetics of the Classical Arabic poetic tradition is the 1993 book, The Zephyrs of Najd: the Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb. In his 1996 book, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough, he integrates the study of Arabian and Islamic myth into the broader fields of comparative mythology and religion. His articles over the years have explored various facets of Classical and Modern Arabic poetry and poetics. His 2015 book, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, gathers and refines twenty years of work on Arabic hunt poetry to demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities of the hunt theme from the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah through Modernist free-verse poetry. His current project is on the ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: Elegy and the Achievement of Allegory in Classical Arabic Poetry.