Ammiel Alcalay is a a poet, translator, critic and scholar. He teaches at Queens College and is former chair of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures; he is on the Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.

After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (UMinnesota Press, 1993), was chosen as one of the top 25 books of 1993 by The Village Voice and named to the year's notable list by The Independent in London. For/Za Sarajevo, a bi-lingual English and Croatian collection he edited, was named by Art Forum as one of 1993’s top 10 choices.

During the war in former Yugoslavia, Alcalay was a primary source for providing access in the American media to Bosnian voices. He edited and co-translated Zlatko Dizdarevic's Sarajevo: A War Journal (Henry Holt, 1994) and Portraits of Sarajevo (Fromm, 1995). He was responsible for publication of the first survivor’s account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic (Basic Books, 1996), which he co-translated and edited.

He edited and co-translated a major new anthology of contemporary Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996), the first collection of its kind in any language. He has also translated two books by the Cuban poet Josè Kozer, Projimos /Intimates (Barcelona, 1990), and The Ark Upon the Number (Cross-Cultural Press, 1982). In 1993, the Singing Horse Press published an original prose work called the cairo notebooks (to appear in Italian translation in 2002 from Oedipus Edizioni). A new book length poem, from the warring factions, is due out in 2002 from Beyond Baroque.

He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice Literary Supplement and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, editorials and translations have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, Middle East Report, Afterimage, Parnassus, City Lights Review, Review of Jewish Social Studies, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Michigan Quarterly, Caliban, Paper Air, Paintbrush, Mediterraneans and various other publications. He is a regular contributor to the two most prominent publications in former Yugoslavia, the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune and the Bosnian magazine DANI.

Sarajevo Blues, a translation of the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, came out from City Lights in 1998, and was prominently reviewed. He recently completed a translation of Mehmedinovic’s new book, Nine Alexandrias, which is under consideration by City Lights. Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (preface by Juan Goytisolo), came out in 1999 from City Lights and was chosen as one of the year’s top 25 books by the Village Voice; it is currently being translated into Croatian. Most recently, A Masque in the Form of a Cento, came out from hole chapbooks in Calgary.