Reading: Ammiel Alcalay & Jill Magi

Where and how does language mark our lines of belonging, unbelonging, or what can we do in language to atomize the boundaries. In work that interrogates our premises of law, nation, and traversal, Ammiel Alcalay and Jill Magi trouble forces of containment, pose counter-consideration to our histories, and offer in poems some more expanded future.

We encourage enthusiastic readers and listeners to engage more deeply with Ammiel Alcalay's and Jill Magi's work by purchasing their books. Ammiel Alcalay's GHOST TALK is available for presale from Pinsapo Press and A Bibliography for ”After Jews and Arabs” from Punctum Books. Jill Magi's SPEECH is available from Nightboat.

Ammiel Alcalay’s co-edited A Dove in Free Flight: Selected Poems of Faraj Bayrakdar will be out in 2021 from Upset Press, along with a new sequence of poems, Ghost Talk, from Pinsapo Press, and A Bibliography for After Jews & Arabs, from Punctum.

Jill Magi splits her time between the United Arab Emirates and Vermont. She works in text, image, and textile, and her recent learning focus is in “textility”—how its disposition upsets all kinds of binaries. She has had exhibitions at Grey Noise, Tashkeel, NYUAD Project Space, and the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center. Her books include Threads (Futurepoem), SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse), LABOR (Nightboat), and SPEECH (Nightboat), and her handmade books are collected by the University at Buffalo poetry collection. She’s taught at CUNY, Eugene Lang College, Goddard College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, and now at NYU in Abu Dhabi. With Sarah Almehairi and Shamma Al Bastaki, she is co-founder of the UAE-based chapbook publishing initiative, JARA Collective.