Each year, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative offers Archival Research Fellowships and Grants to CUNY Graduate Center doctoral students conducting archival research on poets, writers, artists, and musicians whose contributions to New American Poetry remain understudied, including their political, pedagogical, and activist commitments, deepening and complicating common understandings of past historical and cultural moments. This year, thanks to generous support from the Early Research Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, 23 students have received financial and logistical support as they traveled to archives here and abroad, both personal and institutional, developing their innovative research. This archival research is how Lost & Found seeds new publications and programming, so look forward to the flowers of these projects which may take any number of final forms—dissertations, conferences, digital publications, Lost & Found chapbooks, or full-length books published in collaboration with a larger press as part of our Lost & Found Elsewhere series. Read about the 2026 L&F Fellows and their archival research projects:
Tongues of Fire: The Unpublished Poems of Gloria Anzaldúa
“Overcoming the tradition of silence”
During Natasha Tiniacos’s archival research trips to the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, she began uncovering and selecting a group of previously unpublished poems by Anzaldúa. In the archive, Tiniacos found herself moving between roles—researcher, confidant, hound, curator, caretaker—attuned to the affective and intellectual labor of piecing together the poetic work Anzaldúa left behind.
What should remain in silence is a question one asks as boxes and folders come and go from the workstation at the archive. While reading through her carefully organized poetry documents, Tiniacos came across clues that signaled Anzaldúa’s desire to publish those poems. The title—Tongues of Fire—names a key theme in Anzaldúa’s work: language at the threshold, language as rebellion, what shall remain away from standard to contain its power. From this liminal space, a poetic voice emerges to address topics rarely seen in her published writings: her Basque ancestry, lesbian eroticism, and a poetics of the body marked by different corporality, desire, and spiritual reckoning.
This project aims to publish previously unpublished poetry pieces and to frame their significance within Anzaldúa’s larger body of work, following her inspiration to overcome the tradition of silence, celebrating and sharing with the world a tongue stunningly wild. By bringing these poems to light, Tiniacos hope to honor the intimate dimensions of Anzaldúa’s writing and expand our understanding of her legacy as a poet, theorist, and visionary.
The Unknown Works of Richard Pryor
For seven months between 1971-1972, Richard Pryor lived in Berkeley, eager to escape the legal and emotional hardships that plagued him in his quest for showbiz fame in Los Angeles. At once ascetic and acidic, Pryor’s time in Berkeley was an experience of turbulent experimentation and transformation. He fell into a circle of radical Black artists, read Frantz Fanon and George Jackson, and performed benefit shows for the Black Panthers (and became friends with Huey Newton). He wrote poetry and screenplays, composed sound collages, and hosted his own radio program. The more sides of Pryor that can be accessed, the more dimensions of his contradictory oeuvre that can be read and heard, the more we can understand how – more than perhaps any other artist – Pryor was able to stick his finger in the electric socket that was 1970s America and short circuit the entire country
The Letters of Mary Ellen Solt
Mary Ellen Solt is best known for her involvement with concrete poetry in the 1960s, as she not only wrote her own collections of concrete poems but also published the influential 1968 anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View. After the anthology’s initial publication, Solt kept up several years of written correspondence with major concrete poetry founders, such as with Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer and poets of the Noigandres group in Brazil. This project aims to uncover these letters, as well as those from her correspondence with William Carlos Williams and major objectivist poets, as a means to explore further aesthetic, literary, and political dialogues taking place transnationally in this era and discover synchronicities across various components of her archive.
The Collaborative Works of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins
This Lost & Found project began with the poetry and archival materials of the New American poet, Robert Duncan, who was part of the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ in poetry as famously anthologised by Donald Allen in his book The New American Poetry 1945-1960. It was initiated in the fall of 2024 and has since evolved into a more extensive intellectual project which explores the relationship between Duncan’s poetry and Jess Collins’ paintings (Collins
was his partner and long-time collaborator). Through this work, I hope to be able to expand on the literary and aesthetic questions related to Literature and the Visual Arts, compounded by the philosophical traditions of phenomenology in the 20th century.
Interlacing Text and Textile in the Archives of Anni Albers
For Anni Albers, thread is a carrier of meaning meant to be read, interpreted, and sounded as figurative verse.
By researching Albers’ language-driven investments in textile as part of the field of poetics, this project asks
what new insights remain to be parsed from the tangled relationship between text and textile, and centers
what Albers’ own considerations of gaps, stoppages, and pauses in warp and weft brings to the study of
poetry. Albers’ textiles develop the surface of weavings as energetic spaces of inscription and posit language
as a complex architecture of syntax and knots that allows poetic utterance to remain mysterious and
oblique—a rhythmic pattern for the viewer-reader to sound. This archival project inscribes Albers’ work
within the development of New American poetry, thus situating the abstract materiality of the woven page as
a central figure of poetic inquiry.
“‘Have We Finally Got the News?’ : The Cultural Politics of The South End, 1968-1969”
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers commandeered Wayne State University’s student newspaper The South End from 1968-69, drawing on Lenin’s insistence that the newspaper is a fundamental unit of revolutionary organization. Although the League’s interventions in Left cultural production have been addressed by scholars before (memorialized in the film Finally Got the News!), my research studies the culture pages of The South End—housed at the Reuther Library in Detroit—reading poets and writers from the era, in an attempt to understand how cultural products registered and responded to an explosive period in Detroit’s history.
The Unpublished Poems of Maya Deren
Maya Deren (American, 1917–1961) is best known for her seminal contributions to independent American avant-garde cinema, yet her poetry remains largely underexamined. Working in her archive at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, this project draws on her journals, lectures, unpublished poems, and other writings to consider how questions of image, rhythm, and form move between her early poetry and subsequent films. Together, her poetic work comes into view as part of a sustained modernist practice shaping her films.
What Didn’t He Do?: The Unpublished Poetry of Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in postwar American art primarily for his role bridging the gap between Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. He also collaborated widely with writers, especially the New York School Poets, by illustrating and creating prints to accompany their work, such as Stones which he made with Frank O’Hara. Despite his importance as an artist, and the attention given his collaborations, his own writing remains critically underexamined. This project proposes an archival study of Larry Rivers’ unpublished poems housed at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, with the goal of situating Rivers as a writer within the broader field of American Poetry.
LAND: Legacies of Ancestral Narratives of Dispossession
LAND centers how Black and Indigenous communities and artists have documented land dispossession across the 20th century. Utilizing archival records, with priority given to photographs, it traces how relationships to land, identity, and dispossession are remembered over time. This project is being developed to inform theoretical framework for a broader photovoice dissertation study on how land dispossession shapes present-day psychological consequences and lived responses among Black and Indigenous communities.
Nuyo Aesthetic: Archiving the Love and Work of Bobby Gonzalez and Maria Aponte
Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the founders of The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and co-director of The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project (NPCFAP), emphasizes the significance of re-membering the Nuyorican Aesthetic (Nuyo Aesthetic) and the artists and scholars who employ its methodologies, stating, “let it not be forgotten the esthetic that has been developed by the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora in New York City.” Heeding Griffith’s call to assemble our fragmented identities, histories, cultures, languages, and stories, the project Nuyo Aesthetic: Archiving the Love and Work of Bobby Gonzalez and Maria Aponte aims to organize Bobby Gonzales and Maria Aponte’s physical archives and develop two digital databases in the form of an interactive websites. This effort not only aims to preserve their work through digital technology but also intends to celebrate the love and partnership between these two Nuyorican
artists, educators, and organizers. Alongside the digital archives, a companion essay featuring images from the archive and digital databases will offer insights into Gonzalez and Aponte’s love and work, positioning them within the Nuyorican Aesthetic. This essay will additionally explore how the utilization of digital tools can combat historical erasure, preserve cultural memories, and reclaim narratives, doing so all through the lens of her archival artifacts.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Maria Aponte is a Puerto Rican poet, performance artist, educator, and organizer with a Master’s in Latin American/Latino Studies from Fordham University. She is a three-time International Latino Book Award winner for Transitions of a Nuyorican Cinderella (2013), The Gift of Loss (2017), and The Things That Shape Us (2025). Her acclaimed one-woman show, Lágrimas de Mis Madres, is published in Caribe Revista de Cultura y Literatura, and she is the founder of Latina 50 Plus, Inc. (2014–2023), a nonprofit honoring Latinas over 50 across professions, and her work draws on her personal experiences and insights. Also a Bronxite, Bobby Gonzales is a motivational speaker, puppeteer, educator, and organizer who has lectured at Yale, University of Alaska–Fairbanks, and University of Alabama–Huntsville. Having performed at Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Television & Radio,
and the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Museum of the American Indian, University of North Dakota, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe, people revere Gonzalez’s work for drawing on Taíno and Puerto Rican heritage, exemplified by his 2014 chapbook Taíno Zen.
Although they met later in life and married in the 2010s, their relationship fueled their creativity and inspired each other, allowing their work to flourish in ways that enriched both themselves and the Nuyorican and Taíno communities–many of their books published after their marriage. Their partnership reflects the love and sense of family found at the cafe and at the heart of the Nuyorican Aesthetic. However, despite their impact, their love and work remains understudied. Following Bobby Gonzalez’s passing in 2024 and the launch of the Bobby Gonzalez Legacy Project, this project seeks to further honor and extend his and Maria’s legacy, recognizing that documenting her story is just as important as preserving his. Building and working from this project, Nuyo Aesthetic: Archiving the Love and Work of Bobby Gonzalez and Maria Aponte will create from the absence of dialogue surrounding Gonzalez, Aponte, and the Nuyorican Aesthetic by creating a comprehensive showcase that honors their contributions and sheds light on their epistemologies and ontologies–in order for us to not forget.
Arlene Gottfried and Miguel Piñero’s Photographic Collaboration
Throughout the 1980s, Arlene Gottfried photographed the poet, playwright, and actor Miguel Piñero in a series of portraits that examine Piñero’s lived experience in the Lower East Side. While some of these portraits appear on the covers of Piñero’s publications and within Gottfried’s photobook Bacalaitos & Fireworks, a collection of unpublished prints in Gottfried’s archive focuses on Piñero’s drug use. Although the objective of this collection remains unknown,
these portraits emerged as Piñero and other Nuyorican poets fought against the increased policing, gentrification, and negative media representations of the Lower East Side that occurred throughout the decade. In what ways did Gottfried portraits of Piñero contribute to the politics of this moment? How can we read these photographs in collaboration with Piñero’s poetry, as a further means for the poet to reclaim his own image?
The Cultural Archives of Black Feminist London
This collaborative Lost & Found project focuses on the transhistorical Black feminist praxis born out of the anti-colonial convergence space of London. With a focus on radical cultural and educational work, we look at the connections between Black bookstores, supplementary schools, anti-fascist campaigns, radical book faires, and feminist squats. My part of this deeply collaborative project focuses on abolition feminism and cultural work at war.
The Unfinished Musical Conversations of Juan Flores
The Unfinished Musical Conversations of Juan Flores is an archival research project that explores the correspondence, drafts, and unfinished writings of scholar and writer Juan Flores, with particular attention to the collaborative conversations that shaped his work on Latin music, diaspora, and race. By tracing his exchanges with musicians, artists, and activists, the project seeks to reconstruct a network of intellectual and creative dialogue behind works published and unpublished alike, including a lost co- authored book on Eddie Palmieri. Ultimately, the project reconsiders Flores not only as a foundational cultural theorist but as one of the most important Latinx music writers of the twentieth century, whose unfinished work still invites us to listen differently.
When a Poet Speaks: David Wojnarowicz’s Poetry
Although David Wojnarowicz is primarily known as a prose writer and visual artist, his poetry, a considerable body of work written primarily in the mid- to late- 1970s, has been largely ignored. This project aims to publish his poetry for the first time, using his archive of scraps of paper, notebooks, and publications in small publications. It recovers David’s poetic work prior to his art-world recognition, identifying continuities and new perspectives between his writing and visual art. His poetry illuminates his political and social thought (about the state, queerness, and violence), his youthful preoccupations and earliest artistic influences, and adds depth for understanding his fascination with those on the margins of society. Through this research, Villanova aims to theorize Wojnarowicz’s critical epistemology of “disintegration” that speaks to our present political moment and points to a different way of theorizing queer critique.
Materializing Mirages: Samuel Delany’s Poetic Dialogues
From 1985 to 1989, San Francisco-based New Narrative stronghold Kevin Killian edited and published the little magazine, Mirage. While dreaming up a curation of works for a Jack Spicer-centric issue of the magazine, he reached out to Samuel R. Delany to republish Delany’s letter to Lew Ellingham, concerning Ellingham’s drafted biography of Spicer that may be, as Killian writes, may be “part of a private correspondence…but contains a wealth of information on Spicer’s life and concerns and I think that should be brought to the public.”
Yet, to date, the letter’s publication in Mirage is itself a mirage: no Spicer-themed issue of Mirage came to fruition, and Delany’s 15-page, soaring letter spanning literary critical insight, queer syntactical historiography, Bay Area arts gossip, editorial vision, and psychoanalytic conjecture remains locked in the, the typeset and edited version of the letter primed and ready for a publication that has yet to exist. I aim to usher this letter, along with Delany and Killian’s correspondence, from mirage to material, in the form of a Lost & Found chapbook. As I have written before, this chain of correspondence serves as a microcosm of the imbricated social universe of poetry and queer transgressive writing, located at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis but reverberating across a legacy and lineage stretching backwards to the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and into the current moment.
Allen Ginsberg vs the IRS
This completion grant application seeks expenses for turning the research on Allen Ginsberg’s tax returns into a full conference paper and journal article. In the same manner that previous L&F funding was gratefully received to present my findings on Charles Olson at the American Literature Association conference and publish with The Chicago Review, this funding round would allow me to present at the Association for Cultural Economics’ 8th North American Workshop at the annual conference of the Southern Economic Association in November 2026. Founded in 1928, the SEA is one of the 5 main professional economic associations in the US. This conference paper would in turn become an article to be submitted to the Journal of Cultural Economics.
The archival significance of this project is quite timely because it taps into a current focus on scholarly interest in cultural economics in literature. The very recent collection of essays Cultural Funding and Financing illustrates this trend, and I am seeking to make sure that a discussion of modern American poetry is included in this debate because many of the key figures of the New American Poetry survived as artists through unconventional means (vow of poverty, tax loopholes, homesteading, etc) that are important to a scholarly conversation that overemphasized the role of government funding and art markets. Abstract follows.
“Allen Ginsberg vs. the IRS”
In the now-classic text, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966), Baumol observes that while Broadway productions declined in the postwar years, new off-Broadway productions exploded by a factor of six by the 1960s. Rising relative operating costs for performing arts forced many arts organizations into perpetual deficits, while ad hoc, low-overhead off-, and off-off-Broadway organizations allowed experimental theatrical literary work to flourish. Contemporaneous with this economic shift, a literary artform with similarly low overheads underwent significant expansion: poetry. Unlike their peers and predecessors drawn from the elite, the New American Poets of 1945-1960 were entirely from working- or middle-class backgrounds. The question arising is what the specific financial circumstances of these poets must have been in order that a life in writing could take place, given that these writers were not financially independent.
While Baumol’s work rests on thousands of pages of financial records from such venues as the Metropolitan Opera, studying the New American Poets requires a longitudinal study of historical tax microdata accompanied by a Consumer Price Index inflation adjustment in order to understand Ginsberg’s income by contemporary standards. The only known New American Poet whose tax record archives are available for such a study is Allen Ginsberg, perhaps the most famous English-speaking poet of the mid-to-late 20 th century. Formerly embargoed by the artist’s estate, I have been given permission to perform an exploratory analysis of his forms 1040, (US Individual Income Tax Return) from 1946 to 1993, to examine how Ginsberg’s individual pre-tax income (W2, 1099) evolved alongside his business receipts, expenses, and profit as a sole proprietor, to show that his particular method of sustaining a life in literary writing was the strategic deduction of business expenses connected to his work as a poet. This contrasts with other strategies, e.g., Charles Olson’s “vow of poverty” and of Gary Snyder’s life as an outdoorsman, building his own house by hand. Complicating this study is Ginsberg’s decision to withhold tax from the IRS from 1964 to 1975 to protest the Vietnam War. In this paper, I show how Ginsberg balanced the tax liabilities of his individual and business income to support his work– and that of his peers such as William Burroughs– and how his real income as a writer lagged several decades behind the international reputation produced by the publication of “Howl” in 1956.
The Writing Is The Movement: Discovering Amelia Etlinger
For my Lost & Found Archival Research project, I am working with the collections of the little- known artist Amelia Etlinger, which are held at the Special Collections library at SUNY Buffalo, in hopes to raise awareness about her oeuvre. Over Etlinger’s lifetime, her work evolved from visual or concrete poetry into genre-defying elaborate and collaborative multimedia works, using found materials and objects such as fabric, thread, beads, jewelry, bark, and other natural and synthetic materials. Etlinger’s correspondences are a central aspect of her work–she often sent
these delicate assemblages through the mail to friends, making friendship a crucial part of her work and life.
“Language as Gesture and Gesture as Language:” Michael Palmer’s Collaborative Poetics
The poet Michael Palmer is best known for his work of the 70s and 80s which found a place within the often-dogmatic idiom of Language poetry for the more traditional lyric modes of symbolism, expressive verse, and political witness. Less well-known are the collaborations he increasingly turned to in later years, such as with visual artists Irving Petlin and Augusta Talbot, the choreographer Margaret Jenkins, and the Brazilian poet Régis Bonvicino. By studying his
correspondence with these and other figures, I hope to trace the way these collaborations informed Palmer’s growing attention to the spatial and gestural aspects of language. With Palmer as a nexus, I hope, too, to track the political and aesthetic dialogues attending collaboration across media and national boundaries at the end of the 20th century.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Complete Flashing of the Life an interview with Reese Williams
This project presents an interview with Reese Williams, sound artist and founder of Tanam Press as part of my doctoral research on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. It builds on two archival visits to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and centers on Williams’s firsthand memories of his friendship with Cha and his role in publishing DICTEE (1982). The interview traces a relationship he describes as a “deep river like friendship,” moving through letters, shared artistic life, and long after her death. It follows their years in Berkeley, the formation of Tanam Press, and later reflections shaped by grief, sound practice, and memory.
Williams recalls Cha not as a person whose daily life and artistic practice were inseparable, shaped by reading, writing, Tai Chi, and ongoing correspondence. This project resists reducing her legacy to the circumstances of her death and instead returns to her as someone who lived, worked, and imagined within a network of relationships. By bringing Williams’s voice into conversation with archival materials, it seeks to explore a fuller sense of her life and the forces that continue to carry it forward.
Motion Ghosting: The Politics of Light and Presence in Reed and Gunn’s Personal Problems
I would like to propose a project on the work of black poet Ishmael Reed but first, I want to outline how I got to him. Two years ago, with the help of a Lost and Found grant, I spent time in Amiri Baraka’s archive and began to develop a clearer picture of my dissertation. My project argues for a periodization of a problematic that I call “the long 1980s”—a complex of creative and intellectual problems inflecting developments in black expressive culture since the decline of
radical black movements and revolutionary optimism in the 1980s. I argue that, because the assault of Reaganist neoliberalism, the decline and dissolution of the Soviet Union, and other political-economic shifts registered as a kind of death knell for the long arc of 20th century black radical movements in the U.S., black art itself began to register forms of distance, confusion, and even reaction that troubled longstanding theories about what black art even is.
One of my objects is the film Personal Problems (1980), an experimental black soap opera, directed by Bill Gunn from a screenplay by poet and writer Ishmael Reed, an amazing low-budget epic of black working and lower-middle-class drama in Harlem, filmed on an inexpensive Sony U-Matic video camera that when focused on “hot spots” of light would cause them to drag and blur across the screen, an effect called “motion ghosting.” It is a beautiful poetic artifact of black artists working outside the mainstream and the film is still underseen to this day – at the time, Reed remarked, the “black cognoscenti” didn’t appreciate it. One of the film’s satirical characters is a black Reaganite, a stand-in for the upwardly mobile, politically regressive black “buppies” of the 80s.
Reed is a giant in black letters who comes up less often than he should – so I propose two things. First, I would like a Lost and Found grant to help conduct research at the Schomburg Center, where Bill Gunn’s archive is located, and the University of Delaware where much of Reed’s papers and correspondence are housed. This research would be conducted with an eye toward more fully documenting the conception and production of this strange film which has
only been partially and very briefly described in publicly available interviews with Reed after the film’s recent restoration. Not only would this gesamtkunstwerk of black art, an improvisatory collaboration between black poets, actors, filmmakers and musicians be well served by a deeper understanding of its genesis, but we would also gain more insight into the political-economic conditions in which ambitious black art was (barely) able to be made in a decade of political reaction.
For that reason, my second proposal is to travel to Oakland to interview Reed for this project and to get his reflections on black art, politics, and the 1980s which he has written about in fictional form in this film and in his other writing. He is now 87 and it would be great to have this conversation with him while he is still able. I am imagining a Lost and Found folio which would feature this archival material and these reflections from Reed on his poetry and film-work in relation to this momentous, troubling decade.
“In Their Dreams the Bullets Shine Red as Roses”: The Force of Nature and/as the Political in Mary Oliver’s Poetry
Against the typical understanding of Mary Oliver as apolitical, she insisted in her statement of plans for her 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship application: “I am interested in America as a natural force upon our lives. I am not a nature writer, or a conservationist, or an escapist—rather I see the influence of our very singular country upon American life in all facets of that life, spiritual and actual, and whether we know it or not.”
This document and 40,000 other items documenting Oliver’s creative life, friendships, and professional writing and academic careers are housed at the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division. This project seeks to unearth and address the complex and largely overlooked ambivalences and failures of Oliver’s work and life, especially as they relate to lesbian erotics and politics.
Jeanne Lee: Wor(l)d Orderings
This project is focused on the artist, poet, dancer, educator, and pioneer of experimental vocal technique, Jeanne Lee. Lee’s approach to poetry and sound defied categorization and her collaborators ranged from jazz musicians like Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille to concrete poets like Jackson Mac Low. With attention to her deployments of semiotic rhythms and syntactical decomposition, this research project will investigate the political dimensions of her mobilization of poethical signification.
“Cradle of the Revolution”: Claudia Jones and the Editorial Poetics of the West Indian Gazette
This project focuses on Claudia Jones (1915–1964), Trinidad-born organizer and journalist, founded The West Indian Gazette in London in 1958 following her deportation from the United States under the Smith Act. Belser examined Jones’s imprisonment and surveillance and uncovered the transnational pedagogies she facilitated through the Gazette while sustaining communication across the United States and Caribbean. While she identified Gazette-related sources, many are not preserved in Jones’s U.S. archives. As a result, Jones’s London editorial years remain understudied as sites of diasporic cultural and pedagogical production. This project investigates the Gazette as both thematic archive and material artifact within a Black diasporic print ecology. For this project, Belser intends to conduct archival research in London at the British Library, Black Cultural Archives, and George Padmore Institute to deepen thematic analysis and conduct a material culture study of print design. The outcome will be a curated pedagogy guide as public scholarship on the CUNY Manifold website.