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.
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. [1]
Alcalay focused primarily on Hebrew and Jewish literature of the Middle East, in its Islamic, Levantine Arabic, and Israeli contexts. [2] His work on Bosnia during the war in former Yugoslavia has entailed similar efforts at creating the cultural space for unfamiliar works to emerge. [2]
As a university instructor, Prof. Alcalay taught Sephardic literature (both Hebrew and in-translation), 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. [3] 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. [3] 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. [3]
Alcalay was 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." [4] Alcalay's 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." [4]
Since 2010, with support from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, Alcalay was 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. [5]
Alcalay's poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in the New York Times Book Review , The New Yorker , Time , 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. [2]
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. [5]
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. [6] His father is the abstract expressionist painter Albert Alcalay. [6]
The culture of Bosnia and Herzegovina encompasses the country's ancient heritage, architecture, science, literature, visual arts, music, cinema, sports and cuisine.
Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times.
The Culture of Sarajevo is represented in various ways.
Semezdin Mehmedinović (born 1960 in Kiseljak is a Bosnian writer and magazine editor.
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.
BH Dani is a Bosnian language magazine website based in Sarajevo. Until 2010, it was published as a weekly, and then as a monthly magazine. In 2023, the printed edition was replaced with a wholly online model of release.
Sarajevo Blues is a book of poetry first published in 1992 during the siege of Sarajevo by Semezdin Mehmedinović. Mehmedinović's book was translated into English by Ammiel Alcalay in 1998. The text was translated into music by Jewlia Eisenberg in 2004.
Abū Muʿādh Bashshār ibn Burd, nicknamed al-Muraʿʿath, was a Persian poet of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods who wrote in Arabic. Bashshar was of Persian ethnicity; his grandfather was taken as a captive to Iraq, but his father was a freedman (mawla) of the Uqayl tribe. Some Arab scholars considered Bashshar the first "modern" poet, and one of the pioneers of badi' in Arabic literature. It is believed that the poet exerted a great influence on the subsequent generation of poets.
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
The University of Arkansas Press is a university press that is part of the University of Arkansas and has been a member of the Association of University Presses since 1984. Its mission is to publish peer-reviewed books and academic journals. It was established in 1980 by Willard B. Gatewood Jr. and Miller Williams and is housed in the McIlroy House in Fayetteville. Notable authors include civil-rights activist Daisy Bates, US president Jimmy Carter, former US poet laureate Billy Collins, and National Book Award–winner Ellen Gilchrist.
Christopher Robert Agee is an American poet, essayist, editor and publisher living in Ireland. He is the Founder and Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and of The Irish Pages Press/Cló An Mhíl Bhuí as well as the author of four books of poems, and one work of poetic non-fiction. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.
Sami Shalom Chetrit is a Moroccan-born Hebrew poet an inter-disciplinary scholar and teacher, and Israeli social and peace activist.
Peter R. Bush is an English literary translator. He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English, including the work of Josep Pla, Joan Sales and Merce Rodoreda.
Nightboat Books is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 2004 and located in Brooklyn, New York. The press publishes poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and intergenre books.
Lev Hakak is an Israeli-born American lawyer, academic, novelist and poet. He is a Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the author of several books on Hebrew literature. He has written four poetry collections and two novels.
Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis is a Palestinian-American writer and poet. Zarou-Zouzounis writes poetry for all ages, prose, historical fiction for children & adults, short stories and science fiction. She obtained her associate of arts degree from City College of San Francisco, and continued her studies at the renowned Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is described as being influenced by her heritage and has frequently written on subjects relating to the Middle East.
Karim Zaimović was a Bosnian writer, journalist and publicist, best remembered for his short story collection The Secret of Raspberry Jam. He is considered one of the most talented writers from the wartime ex-Yugoslavian area.
Joe Safdie is an American poet, critic, and educator. He's published seven books of poems as well as essays in journals including Jacket, Jacket 2, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and most recently, in March 2021, Caesura. In February of 2020 he presented a paper entitled "Edward Dorn, Satire, and the Via Negativa" at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture; it was later published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and featured on academia.edu. While writer-in-residence at the Gloucester Writers Center in June 2016, he presented "Charles Olson and Finding One's Place," later published in the Journal of Poetics Research. He also edited the literary magazines Zephyr and Peninsula. After 28 years of teaching English at various colleges, he retired in 2019 and moved to Portland, Oregon, continuing a pattern of living in cities on the West Coast of North America including, in reverse order, Encinitas, California, Seattle, Washington, and Bolinas, California.
Celia Hawkesworth is an author, lecturer, and translator of Serbo-Croatian.
Hua Xi is a poet and artist. They have earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, as well as the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award, and their work has appeared in several publications like The Atlantic and Electric Literature.
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