Ammiel Alcalay (born 1956) is anAmerican poet, scholar, critic,translator, and prose stylist. Born and raised inBoston, he is a first-generation American, son ofSephardic Jews fromSerbia. His work often examines how poetry and politics affect the way we see ourselves and the way Americans think about theMiddle 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 formerYugoslavia he was a primary source for providing access in the American media toBosnian voices. He was responsible for publication of the first survivor's account in English from a victim held in aSerbconcentration camp,The Tenth Circle of Hell byRezak Hukanović (Basic Books, 1996), which he co-translated and edited.[1]
Alcalay focused primarily onHebrew andJewish literature of the Middle East, in itsIslamic,Levantine Arabic, andIsraeli contexts.[2] His work onBosnia during the war in formerYugoslavia has entailed similar efforts at creating the cultural space for unfamiliar works to emerge.[2]
As a university instructor, Prof. Alcalay taughtSephardic 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 ofa 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 theNew 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 theCenter for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, Alcalay was the initiator and general editor ofLost & 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 anAmerican Book Award from theBefore Columbus Foundation in recognition of this work.[5]
Alcalay's poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in theNew 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 theCUNY Graduate Center; and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Translation and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures atQueens College.[5]
In February 2024, he published an article against theGaza genocide.[6]
Alcalay's parents areSephardi Jews who immigrated toBoston fromBelgrade,Serbia, in what was thenYugoslavia. His Sephardi ancestors were originally fromSpain.[7] His father is the abstract expressionist painterAlbert Alcalay.[7]
He corresponded with the Moroccan activistAbraham Serfaty.[8]
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