Ammiel Alcalay  grew up in Boston and, as a child, spent time in Gloucester where family friends included Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini. As a teenager, through the Grolier and Temple Bar Bookshops in Cambridge, he befriended many poets, including John Wieners. Poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist, he teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include Scrapmetal (2006); From the Warring Factions (2002), a book length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays (1999); After Jews and Arabs (1993), and the Cairo Noteboooks (1993). His translations include Sarajevo Blues (1998) and Nine Alexandrias (2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Keys to the Garden (1996), and a co-translation (with Oz Shelach), of Outcast by Shimon Ballas (2007). A new book of essays, A Little History, is due out in 2011.  Islanders, a novel, came out in 2010. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and organized, with Mike Kelleher and Fred Dewey, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, through the PhD Program in English and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, he initiated Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry.