The Thought Project Podcast At The Graduate Center

This week’s guest, Ammiel Alcalay, is a poet, translator, critic, scholar, and activist who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, through The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in English and the Center for the Humanities, he launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student- and guest-edited chapbooks of archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry, one of the premier initiatives in graduate-level primary research about poets and poetry, situated in an American university . Alcalay’s books and publications include Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2006); from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002), a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999); After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (U