American Book Awards
1 appearances
-
Edition 38 (2017) Winner
Ammiel Alcalay
アミエル・アルカライ
Ammiel Alcalay
Profile
- Gender
- Male
- Born
- 1956-01-01 （Boston, Massachusetts, United States）
- Nationality
- United States
- Languages
- English, Hebrew (as translation source), Bosnian (as translation source)
- Residence History
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA → New York City (Queens, CUNY)
Career
- Occupations
- poet, scholar, critic, translator, prose stylist, professor
- Active Years
- 1980-
- Affiliations
- CUNY Graduate Center, Queens College, City University of New York
- Influenced By
- Charles Olson, The New American Poetry (movement), Sephardic traditions
- Influenced
- Generations of poets and scholars connected to CUNY initiatives, New currents in Levantine and translation studies
Awards
| Year | Award | Work | Category | Organization | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | American Book Award | Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative (as general editor/initiator) | — | Before Columbus Foundation | 受賞 |
American Book Award
2017
Work:
Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative (as general editor/initiator)
Organization:
Before Columbus Foundation
Result:
受賞
Awards & Nominations
Works
Major Works
After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
1993 scholarship / comparative cultural studiesA scholarly comparative study of Jewish and Arab cultural relations in the Levant, assessing possibilities of cultural remaking; regarded as an important contribution to Levantine studies.
Levantine culturememory and coexistencecomparative literature
A Little History
2012 literary criticism / biographyExamines the life and work of Charles Olson against the Cold War backdrop, exploring the relationship between poetry, resistance, and the politics of memory.
poeticsmemoryresistance
neither wit nor gold
2011 poetryA collection of recent poems interweaving personal history, political events, and meditations on language and translation.
memoryexile / diasporatranslation
Islanders
2010 poetryA poetry collection themed around islands and separation, containing experimental poems woven from personal and historical fragments.
geography and memoryisolationfragments of history
from the warring factions
2002 book-length poemA long poem dedicated to Srebrenica and the Bosnian conflict, confronting war, memory, and trauma.
warmemorytestimony
Bibliography
- After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993)
- Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (1999)
- from the warring factions (2002)
- Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East (2003)
- Sarajevo Blues (translation, 1998)
- A Little History (2012)
Translations by Author
- Outcast by Shimon Ballas (translated from Hebrew, co-translator, 2007)
- Nine Alexandrias by Semezdin Mehmedinović (translated from Bosnian, 2003)
- Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović (translated from Bosnian, 1998)
- Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (editor/translator, 1996)
Style & Themes
- Literary Style
- comparative-literary approachfragmentary / prose-poetic expressionmeta-linguistic concerns informed by translation theory
- Recurring Motifs
- memoryexile / diasporaLevantine and Balkan geographiestranslation and the recovery of voices
Legacy
Ammiel Alcalay has contributed across poetry, translation, and scholarship to the reassessment of Levantine studies and the New American Poetry, and promoted Bosnian and Hebrew literature in English; as an educator at CUNY he has influenced many students.
Archives
- PennSound (audio archive holds readings and lectures)
Trivia
- His father is abstract expressionist painter Albert Alcalay.
- Won an American Book Award in 2017 for his work on Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
- First-generation American born in Boston to Sephardic Jewish parents from Belgrade.