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You See What You See: Lois Elaine Griffith

Name: You See What You See: Lois Elaine Griffith
SKU: 72817
Availability: InStock

$20.00

You See What You See is a collection of Lois Elaine Griffith’s picture-poems discovered in notebooks from 2007 and 2012-2013 stored among her papers, which are now located with her archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at The New York Public Library. These picture-poems reflect the surrealism of Griffith’s art practice, embracing diverse ways of being and seeing to construct images that inspire s collaborative curiosity that shapes a kaleidoscopic vision between reader and artist. Griffith is one of the last surviving co-founders of the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe. You See What You See exemplifies the communal spirit at the heart of the Cafe’s founders’ work, in that it calls for a gathering.

The book is a trade edition co-published by Granary Books and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. The first edition of You See What You See was published by Granary Books in 2025, as a limited-edition artist’s book in an edition of 33 copies.

Images and words by Lois Elaine Griffith.
Design by M.C. Kinniburgh, with digital image editing by Jason Walz.
Set in Bulmerand Big Shoulders typefaces.
ISBN: 978-1-958675-08-3
Pages: 54
Copyright Lois Elaine Griffith. Courtesy of Lois Elaine Griffith’s papers.
Saddle stitch, French archival paper.

See more images from You See What You See 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.