Noor Mohammed Danish is a Pakistani poet of African and Baloch descent. He is more commonly known as Noon Meem Danish or N. M. Danish.
Noor Mohammed was born in 1958 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan to a working-class family. He was raised in Lyari, a largely Sheedi neighbourhood, which he describes as "Karachi's Harlem". He did his early education at the Okhai Memon School in Kharadar, and began writing poetry in 1974. Noor Mohammed's African appearance often led people around him to assume he was a foreigner; he describes being asked frequently where he was from and why he spoke Urdu so well.
After receiving his master's degree in Urdu from the University of Karachi in 1984, Noor Mohammed began teaching at the Urdu College.
In 2000, he emigrated to the United States; he had remarked to a friend that he would prefer to be "a third class citizen of a first class country than a first class citizen of a third class country," but put off going through the procedures for almost two years due to his ambivalence about leaving his home. He first took up residence in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York City; he chose it because of its diversity, which helped him to feel less of a stranger as well as affording him the opportunity to study others' cultures. At first, he could only find job as a security guard, but he eventually joined the faculty of New York University; he later moved to the University of Maryland as a language consultant.
