Alexander was born in the USSR and is a graduate of the University of Dagestan (B.A. 1986), University of Delaware (M.A. 1993), and University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. 1996). His publications appeared in the United States, Spain, Canada, Russia, and Azerbaijan. He also has a mediatic presence on TV and radio in Latin America, Europe, and Asia and performed in the most prestigious venues and festivals. His poetry won honorable mention in the 2018 Victoria Urbano creative writing competition (Chicago, USA), and the silver medal in the 2019 Eurasian literary festival in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Alexander Selimov’s writing was influenced by his experience living in Havana, Cuba, where he worked as a military translator at the Division of International Relations of MINFAR. His creative work addresses the act of writing and the themes of love, sensuality, loss, otherness, and war.
His academic and outreach activities promote personal development through creative writing and humanities. His teaching and scholarly interests include romanticism, social constructionism, identity fashioning, translation studies, theater, and music as political warfare. Among his books are Derroteros de la Memoria, De la ilustración al modernismo, Autobiografía y Epistolarios de Amor, Lecturas Creadoras, Ventanas a otros Cuerpos, Post-factum, and Desfío.
Ventanas a otros cuerpos (Windows to Other Bodies, Madrid: Spain, 2017) is a compiled volume of five collections of poems, written between 1988 and 2006. The volume was praised by literary critics:
Dr. Alexander Selimov's poetry oscillates, in this book, between crisis and the recovery of intimacy, between absence and presence, between the past and the present, between the "you" and the self, and between companionship and loneliness. We are in the presence of one of the most authentic voices in the panorama of contemporary poetry in Spanish which, as an added merit, has fully integrated into a linguistic community and a cultural identity far removed from its origins.
Every poem in these books is proof of talent and intuition for poetry. Professor Selimov could write poems in Russian, his mother tongue, but he chooses to write in Spanish, in which he has absolute control of the literary technique. This linguistic choice inscribes Professor Selimov's name in a long literary tradition of poets who adopted Spanish as their poetic mother tongue. Yet, why a poet born and raised in Russia chose Spanish as his poetic language? And why the mother tongue is supplanted in terms of his anthropological demand as a creative path? Maybe the reason why Selimov writes in Spanish is that he woke up to literature as a poet in this language. The human being awakens to his creative dimension in different ways, and the path is often full of deep sensory, perceptive and existential complexities. Alexander Selimov's poetry transcends cultural, national, and linguistic borders and opens up to a different sensibility and gnoseology of poetic reality. Ventanas opens from another unsuspected perspective a new line of inquiry about those fuzzy identities typical of today's global contexts
Dr. Selimov’s most recent poetry from the new collection written in English was published in the #66 Spring Volume of Dreamstreets Poetry Review (since 1977).