Ammiel Alcalay on Publishing Lost Post-War Writing

Author, scholar, and professor Ammiel Alcalay discusses “Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative” and “Lost & Found Elsewhere,” two publishing ventures that he initiated with graduate students at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Alcalay explores the practical pedagogy of intergenerational transmission, as well as the cultural and political practice of thickening the historical record through archival research. Alcalay and fellow researchers seek out these documents in public and private libraries and archives around the world. He talks about what it is like to discover the unknown correspondence, journals, and writings of modern-day American well-known and lesser-known post-WWII poets and writers.

The event was presented on March, 2016, by UMass Lowell’s Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities in conjunction with “Kerouac Retrieved,” an exhibit of the author’s personal items from his final home in Florida that have been displayed at the university’s Allen House.