Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, widely known for his scholarship on the Middle East.

We recently spoke about his youth spent hanging out with some of the most important poetic voices of the twentieth century — from Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg to Diane di Prima — his Vietnam War era anti-draft activism and CUNY’s archival “Lost and Found” project.