Riyaz Latif emerged as a noteworthy voice in Urdu poetry during the last decade of the twentieth century. His intricately fresh poetic imagery makes him distinctive as a writer. Several reputed literary journals have carried his poems, and he has to his credit two collections of poetry in Urdu, and a book of translations into Urdu from European poetry. He translates between Urdu and English, and has published creative essays which draw into their fold the composite relationships between the visual, the cultural, and the literary. As an academic, he is an art historian, primarily centered on premodern Islamic cultures. He received his PhD in the History of Art from the University of Minnesota for his work on the Marinids of North Africa, and after a postdoctoral fellowship with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the MIT at Cambridge, he taught at Wellesley College and Vanderbilt University in the United States of America. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at FLAME University, Pune.