Compassion Beyond Reason with Anaïs Duplan

Wed, Dec 3, 2025

10:00 AM–11:15 AM

All are welcome. This 75-min online workshop series will take place virtually via Zoom. Register below to attend and we’ll email you the Zoom link.

Compassion Beyond Reason is a monthly online workshop series led by trans* poet, artist, and meditation teacher Anaïs G. Duplan on listening, reflecting, and responding to the urgency of the present. Participants within and outside the CUNY community will be invited to explore empathy beyond what we may consider ‘reasonable.’

Expanding from the previous meditation series, “Meditation for Climate Activists and the Climate-Conscious,” this series aims to discover how we can attune to different anxieties and suffering, from the climate crisis to immigration, COVID, and trans rights issues, using tools of earth-based practices. Sessions will employ writing, deep listening and discussion, and somatic practices to facilitate meaningful relationships with each other and extended communities.


This 75-min monthly online workshop series hosted by Anaïs G. Duplan (and co-facilitated with Farnoosh Fathi in November) will take place from October to December 2025 on Zoom. This series is open to all people, and we are encouraging participants to bring or invite a member of their organizing families (someone not from the CUNY community) to participate in the workshop together. Is there someone you would like to invite to the workshop series? Register to attend here.

Fall 2025 sessions will be held on the following dates:

About the Workshop Facilitator

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the book I NEED MUSIC;Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; Take This Stallion; and the chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and others. Visit his website here for more information.

This series is co-presented by the Center for the Humanities and the NYC Climate Justice Hub.