Ammiel Alcalay
Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

“‘Follow the Person’ / Out of the Schools & Into the Archives”

Tuesday, March 8th
at 3:30pm in Allen House
UMass Lowell South Campus

Please join the UMass Lowell Kerouac Center and Ammiel Alcalay as he discusses Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and Lost & Found Elsewhere, two publishing ventures that he initiated with graduate students at The Graduate Center, CUNY. The Lost & Found projects bring to print important and unpublished work by well known and lesser known post-WWII writers (including Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Judy Grahn, Helene Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Michael Rumaker, Jean Sénac, Jack Spicer, and John Wieners). Alcalay will explore the the practical pedagogy of intergenerational transmission, as well as the cultural and political practice of thickening the historical record through archival research.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, critic, scholar, and activist who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include Islanders (City Lights), and neither wit nor gold: from then (Ugly Duckling). His After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota) was the subject of a 20th anniversary conference at Georgetown in 2012. He has translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović, both from City Lights. A new book of essays, a little history, and a 10th anniversary reprint of from the warring factions came out in 2013 from re:public/UpSet.

More information about Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative is available here. Professor Alcalay is the initiator and General Editor of Lost & Found, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry.

Professor Alcalay’s talk is presented in conjunction with “Kerouac Retrieved,” an exhibit of Kerouac’s personal items housed in Allen House. More information about the exhibit is locatedhere.

This event is sponsored by The Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities at UMass Lowell, as well as the American Studies Program.

Allen House is located on the South Campus of UMass Lowell at 2 Solomont Way, Lowell, MA, 01854. Parking is available in the public metered lot at the intersection of Wilder and Bachelder Streets (a short walk from Allen House). Please contact Michael Millner with questions.