Аммиэль Алкалай: Поэт, ученый и голос Ближнего Востока в Америке.

American writer

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. Alcalay focused primarily on Hebrew and Jewish literature of the Middle East, in its Islamic, Levantine Arabic, and Israeli contexts. 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. 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." 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."

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.