Workshop

“Realizing the Dream of a Black University”: Pedagogy Workshop on Toni Cade Bambara

Wed, Mar 4, 2026

2:00 PM–4:00 PM

Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center. This free workshop is open to all CUNY students and adjuncts. Space is limited. Please register to attend.

In 2017, the Center for the Humanities’ Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative published Toni Cade Bambara’s teaching archives, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University,” in a chapbook series that also included June Jordan and Audre Lorde’s archives, after its 2013 publication of Adrienne Rich‘s teaching archives. These “CUNY teaching archives” have circulated widely and fostered new directions in scholarship and movements that embrace these luminous figures’ legacies.

To honor Bambara’s relationship to CUNY, New York City, and beyond, this pedagogical workshop will welcome Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed, in collaboration with GC students, Lucien Baskin, Janelle Poe, and Jenna Queenan, to discuss how to ignite learning spaces with inspiration from Bambara’s own teaching practices.

This free workshop is open to all CUNY students and adjuncts. Space is limited. Please register to attend.

Following this workshop, join us at 5:30 PM for a public screening of the new feature film TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing—and a conversation with the directors Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez who will be in dialogue with Bambara scholars and GC alums Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed.

To access Lost & Found’s Free Digital Archival Publications on Manifold of the CUNY Pedagogy Series, visit our page here or each book below (and all L&F publications can be found here):

Toni Cade Bambara: “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” & Other Writings, Part I:

Toni Cade Bambara: “Realizing the Dream of a Black Univeristy” & Other Writings, Part II:

Audre Lorde: “I teach myself in outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha

June Jordan: “Life Studies,” 1966-1976

Adrienne Rich: “What We Are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974, Part I

Adrienne Rich: “What We Are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974, Part II

Participants

Workshop Facilitators

Lucien Baskin

Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow

ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow

Janelle Poe

Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow

Makeba Lavan

Conor (Coco) Tomás Reed

Jenna Queenan

This event is hosted by the Center for the Humanities, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the Teaching and Learning Center, the Ph.D. Program in English, the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, the M.A. in Digital Humanities Program, The Center for the Study of Women and Society, and Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center.