Conversation

Binding Friendship: Megan Behrent Explores Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich

Fri, Mar 28, 2025

4:00 PM–5:30 PM

This hybrid event takes place in the English Student Lounge (Room 4406), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC, and online via Zoom. Free and open to all. Register to attend in person. Find Zoom link and info below to join online.

Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and an unidentified person. 1982 at an Astraea Foundation event at Hunter College. Image courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Donna Allegra Collection.

Join us for the English Friday Forum at the CUNY Graduate Center for an engaging conversation with Megan Behrent on her forthcoming book Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and the Women’s Liberation Movement (working title). This book explores the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich including their letters, debates, and shared commitment to radical feminist politics. Through their words, we see how poetry and activism intertwined, shaping the Women’s Liberation Movement and their own evolving political visions. Behrent will be in conversation with English student and Lost & Found Fellow Ju Ly Ban, whose research explores poetry, Black feminism, and queer kinship.

About the participants:

Megan Behrent (Speaker) is an Associate Professor of English at City Tech, CUNY. Her research focuses on literature and social movements at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. She is the recipient of a faculty award from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) for 2020-2021 for her forthcoming book, Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the Women’s Liberation Movement. This work has also been supported by several PSC-CUNY Research grants and by a fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is a contributor to Inside Our Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2017) and Education and Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly, Assuming Gender, College Literature, the Harvard Educational Review, International Socialist Review, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, New Politics, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Workplace: a Journal of Academic Labor and WSQ.

Ju Ly Ban (Moderator) is a Ph.D. student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Fellow for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and teaches composition at Baruch College. Her research focuses on Black feminism and queer kinship. She is currently studying the work of Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha drawing connections to Black feminist thinkers including bell hooks and Audre Lorde.

This English Department Friday Forum event is organized by Ju Ly Ban. *Feel free to reach out with any questions—Ju Ly Ban (jban@gradcenter.cuny.edu).

Co-sponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the Center for the Humanities, and the Graduate Students’ Council (DGSC) at the CUNY Graduate Center.

*This event is free and open to all. We’d love to have you join us! Register here to attend in person, and below to join us online via Zoom: