Symposium
& Festival: "The World Republic of Literature"
Lannan Symposium,
April 11-12, 2006
Gonda Theatre, Georgetown University
Ammiel Alcalay
Ammiel Alcalay is a a poet, translator, critic and scholar. He teaches at Queens College and is former chair of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures; he is on the faculties in American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (UMinnesota Press, 1993), was chosen as one of the top 25 books of 1993 by The Village Voice and named to the year's notable list by The Independent in London. For/Za Sarajevo, a bi-lingual English and Croatian collection he edited, was named by Art Forum as one of 1993s top 10 choices. Other books include Memories of Our Future: Essays 1982-1999, from City Lights.
During the war in former Yugoslavia, Alcalay was a primary source for providing access in the American media to Bosnian voices. He edited and co-translated Zlatko Dizdarevic's Sarajevo: A War Journal (Henry Holt, 1994) and Portraits of Sarajevo (Fromm, 1995). He was responsible for publication of the first survivors account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic (Basic Books, 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 (City Lights, 1996), the first collection of its kind in any language. He has also translated two books by the Cuban poet Jos Kozer, Projimos /Intimates (Barcelona, 1990), and The Ark Upon the Number (Cross-Cultural Press, 1982). In 1993, the Singing Horse Press published an original prose work called the cairo notebooks. A book length poem, dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, from the warring factions, came out in 2002 from Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles. His translations of Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Saraevo Blues, and Nine Alexandrias (both published by City Lights), have been prominently reviewed. A co-translation (with Oz Shelach) of Outcast by Shimon Ballas is due out from City Lights in Fall 2006. A new book of essays, A Little History, is coming out from Beyond Baroque in 2006; Scrapmetal, a work of mixed prose, poetry, and criticism, will be out in the Heretical Texts series from Factory School in the Fall of 2006. The Selected Poems of Faraj Bayrakdar, a project by the New York Translation Collective, edited by Alcalay with Shareah Taleghani, is also due out from Beyind Baroque in 2006.
He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice Literary Supplement and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, editorials and translations have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic, 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 has been a regular contributor to the two most prominent publications in former Yugoslavia, the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune and the Bosnian magazine DANI. An activist on many domestic and international issues, he is one of the founders, along with poet Anne Waldman, of the Poetry Is News Coalition.