Ammiel Alcalay, Lost & Found Win American Book Award

We're thrilled to hear the news that CUNY-Grad Center Professor Ammiel Alcalay is the recipient of an American Book Award for his accomplishents as the founder and editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. First published in 2010, Lost & Found is a chapbook series that compiles and distributes ephemeral writings of vital importance (journals, lectures) by poets and writers. Or, as Alcalay explains: "'The writers we focus on were thinkers and activists, and we’re constantly looking for other materials they’ve worked on...Writers have been narrowly construed, and we want to publish things people haven’t thought about and that have been sitting in the archives.'" Let's pick up there: 

Lost & Found Series VI, published last year, presented work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. Juan Felipe Herrera, the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, said of the series: “The Lost & Found project is a place where I go to find myself again — I meet geniuses and early-day friends that I met on the road like Kathy Acker, Diane di Prima, and Adrienne Rich.”
 
Alcalay, in addition to his work for Lost & Found, is a poet, novelist, translator, critic, scholar, and activist. His most recent books include little history (UpSet press, 2013), neither wit nor gold: from then (Ugly Duckling, 2011), and Islanders (City Lights, 2010).

Congratulations, Ammiel Alcalay! Read on at CUNY. And if you recall, we published this convo with Alcalay and Ana Božičević back in 2011 about getting Lost & Found up and running.