Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar; he teaches in the department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures and in the Medieval Studies Program and Comparative Literature Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest work, from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002), is a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East, a lecture given at Cornell, was published in 2003 by Palm Press. His other books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the cairo noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999). He has also translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic (City Lights, 1998), and Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996). Current projects include translations of a new book by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Nine Alexandrias, due out from City Lights in Fall, 2003; a Hebrew novel, Outcast, by Shimon Ballas, and a book of essays, Politics & Imagination. He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, and various other publications.