From Published Works, From lost and found

Series X

Name: Series X
SKU: 72756
Price: 40.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$40.00

Lost & Found Series X archival publications of Lois Elaine Griffith

Tags: Lost & Found, lost and found

Lost & Found Series X focuses on the literary, visual, and cultural work of Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Since its inception in 1973, this Puerto Rican cultural center has been a site where artists from the Nuyorican and Black arts movements have come to share their work, voices, histories, talents, and language on its stage. While the scant existing scholarship on the Cafe has been told from the perspectives of its predominately male and/or Latinx founders, this series seeks to reinstate Griffith’s essential role as a founder, and honor Griffith’s stewardship of the Cafe’s archive.

The four publications presented in Series X highlight how Griffith brings Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions to her archival work, disrupting the legacies of colonization and transatlantic slavery through cultural creation and preservation. Series X, edited Lost & Found scholar and archival collaborator Joseph Cáceres, includes the following archival publications of Lois Elaine Griffith, which you can find more information about or buy individually below by clicking the image for each publication:

Dedications includes selections from unpublished poetry manuscripts of Griffith’s poetics of memorialization devoted to loved ones and others who died due to sudden illness, during the HIV/AIDS crisis, or the result of American racism.

The cover of the proof of Griffith’s unpublished manuscript, *Dedications*. Courtesy of Lois Elaine Griffith’s papers.

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) includes a collection of Griffith’s surrealist visual artwork which led to collaborative projects with artists of the feminist, Black and Nuyorican arts movements.

Phil Smith, Griffith, and Miguel Algarín outside the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Keeper of the Archive further documents people important to the Cafe’s legacy not found in academic narratives, whose legacies are kept alive through Griffith’s meticulous archival work. Through Griffith, we are invited to witness relationships between poet and costume designer Marcel Christian, photographers Arlene Gottfried and Tony Gleaton, and the Cafe.

*Lois Elaine Griffith walking up the steps of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe* *on February 23, 2023. Photo courtesy of Bing Guan, 2023.*

Finally, You See What You See (a collaboration and co-publication with Granary Books) is a collection of Griffith’s picture-poems discovered in a notebook stored among her papers, and represents an aesthetic offering meant to inspire curiosity and collaboration, mirroring the kaleidoscopic vision of both Griffith’s and the Cafe’s aesthetic.

Lois Elaine Griffith’s picture-poems. Courtesy of our collaborator and co-publisher Granary Books.

Lost & Found Series X ISBN: 978-1-958675-09-0

See more images from Lost & Found Series X books 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.