ammiel alcalay

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1956. His most recent publications include Scrapmetal (2007), a volume of poetry and criticism; A Little History (2007), essays; and from the warring factions (2007), a book-length poem. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, Alcalay was a primary source for providing access in the American media to Bosnian writers. He was responsible for the publication of the first survivor account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic (1996), which he co-translated and edited. He edited and co-translated a major anthology of contemporary Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (1996), and has translated works by Zlatko Dizdarevic and Semezdin Mehmedinovic. Alcalay has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice Literary Supplement and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, editorials, and translations have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post, and Middle East Report. He is a professor at Queens College and is on the Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature, American Studies and English faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Alcalay is the 2007-2008 Lannan Foundation Visiting Professor in Poetics at Georgetown University.