From Published Works

Dedications: Lois Elaine Griffith

Name: Dedications: Lois Elaine Griffith
SKU: 72791
Availability: InStock

$10.00

This publication, part of Lost & Found Series X, features eight poems from Lois Elaine Griffith’s unpublished manuscript Dedications written around the early 2000s. Framed by Griffith’s experiences as a diasporic woman of West Indian descent, the poems document the history, romance, love, and loss witnessed in the ordinary drama of everyday American life. Yoruba beliefs lie at the heart of Griffith’s poetics, where reverence for the ancestors and remembering the bodies dismembered and disremembered by a legacy of transatlantic slavery are part of an aesthetic invested in promoting self-discovery through wrestling with humanity’s beautiful “ugliness.”Dedications is edited by Lost & Found scholar and archival collaborator Joseph Anthony Cáceres.

ISBN: 978-1-958675-05-2
Pages: 69
Copyright Lois Elaine Griffith. Courtesy of Lois Elaine Griffith’s papers.
Saddle stitch, French archival paper

See images from Dedications below:

Lois Elaine Griffith and Joseph Anthony Cáceres Bios

Joseph Anthony Cáceres and Lois Elaine Griffith. Photo credit: John Sarsgard, 2024.

Lois Elaine Griffith is a visual and literary artist of West Indian descent. For 23 years she was professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. As one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, after retiring from the day-to-day business of producing at the Cafe, she established the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project dedicated to the documentation, collection and presentation of evidence of cultural expressions produced at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the latter part of the 20th century. In 2024, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At present, she is working on – Come To Terms/Llegar A Un Acuerdo – a project about knowledges and naming – evidencing for archive.

Joseph Anthony Cáceres is a queer Nuyorican writer, archivist, and scholar. His work has been published in Evergreen Review, Rican Writing, Slice magazine, CURA, and Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, he is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts’ Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant for Fiction, and LAMBDA Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Joseph holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a senior archivist for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project. He is currently working on three book projects revolving around the Cafe’s aesthetic, featuring unpublished works and other archival artifacts that record the forgotten contributions of the Cafe’s founders and affiliated artists.