Ammiel Alcalay

Ammiel Alcalay (born 1956) is an American poet, scholar, critic, translator, and prose stylist. Born and raised in Boston, he is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews from Serbia. His work often examines how poetry and politics affect the way we see ourselves and the way Americans think about the Middle East, with attention to methods of cultural recovery in the United States, the Middle East and Europe.
Brief overview.
Alcalay is perhaps best known as a Middle Eastern scholar and university instructor. During the war in former Yugoslavia he was a primary source for providing access in the American media to Bosnian voices. He was responsible for publication of the first survivor's account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, "The Tenth Circle of Hell" by Rezak Hukanović (Basic Books, 1996), which he co-translated and edited.
"Over the past fifteen years," writes Alcalay, "I have focused primarily on Hebrew and Jewish literature of the Middle East, in its Islamic, Levantine Arabic, and Israeli contexts. My work on Bosnia during the war in former Yugoslavia has entailed similar efforts at creating the cultural space for unfamiliar works to emerge. Throughout, my work as poet and prose-writer remains a crucial reference point, representing a kind of standard in form and content that I insist my other writing (and translation) adheres to."
As a university instructor, Prof. Alcalay has taught Sephardic Literature (both Hebrew and in-translation), and a variety of courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literacy and intellectual culture and its contemporary and modern reception, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as creative writing. "After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture" (1993)––Alcalay's first book of scholarship and a critical contribution to Levantine studies––was the subject of a 20th anniversary conference at Georgetown University in 2012. A comparatist by training, Alcalay specializes in these topics and in Balkan literatures and history, poetics, and theories of translation; he publishes translations of Hebrew and Bosnian, as well as his own poetry.
A versatile and prolific scholar, Alcalay has also been instrumental in recovering and promoting scholarship on the New American Poetry, insisting (as Cole Heinowitz writes) on "the necessary interrelatedness of scholarly, political, and creative endeavors and the individual and collective human experiences from which they grow." Alcalay's most recent book, "a little history" (2013), examines the life and work of poet Charles Olson "against the backdrop of the Cold War and Alcalay’s personal reflections on the institutionalized production of knowledge, at once investigating the historical relationship between poetry and resistance and enacting the politics of memory and imagination."
Since 2010 and with support from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, Alcalay is the initiator and General Editor of "Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative", a series of student- and guest-edited archival texts emerging from New American Poetry. In 2017, Alcalay was awarded an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in recognition of this work.
Alcalay's poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in the "New York Times Book Review", "The New Yorker", "Time Magazine", "The New Republic", "The Village Voice", "The Jerusalem Post", "Grand Street", "Conjunctions", "Sulfur", "The Nation", "Middle East Report", "Afterimage", "Parnassus", "City Lights Review", "Review of Jewish Social Studies", "The Review of Contemporary Fiction", "The Michigan Quarterly", "Caliban", "Paper Air", "Paintbrush", "Mediterraneans", and various other publications.
He is currently a professor in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center; and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Translation and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College.
Personal life.
Alcalay's parents are Sephardi Jews who immigrated to Boston from Belgrade, Serbia, in what was then Yugoslavia. His Sephardi ancestors were originally from Spain. His father is the abstract expressionist painter Albert Alcalay.