Department of English

• Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Arts Cafe

If you’d like to join us, please RSVP by emailingwh@writing.upenn.edu or by calling (215) 746-POEM.

Special guest Ammiel Alcalay — poet, novelist, translator, critic, editor, and scholar extraordinaire — will share his experiences as founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. For his work on the chapbook series, launched in 2010, Alcalay was given a 2017 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation. Lost & Found is one of the most exciting and groundbreaking archival poetry projects today — recuperating and publishing unique original texts by a wide-ranging group of figures such as Audre Lorde, William Burroughs, Langston Hughes, Diane di Prima, Ted Joans, Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, Nancy Cunard, just to name a few. Combining scholarly exegesis with preservationist ethics, Lost & Found is fundamentally collaborative, bringing together poets and scholars, faculty and students, personal and institutional, past and future. In dialogue with Penn English faculty Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Alcalay will speak about the origins of the project, its vision, its accomplishments, and its future. Anyone interested in literary archives, editorial work, twentieth-century poetry, material text, and how scholars today can wrest poetic history from the gaping maw of historical and institutional entropy will be in for a treat. The lunchtime event will also invite questions from students and members of the audience. Copies of selected Lost & Found chapbook series will be available for sale.

Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar AMMIEL ALCALAY teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then, from the warring factions, and a little history. Translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović. He was given a 2017 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation for his work as founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

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