Joseph Cáceres

Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow

Joseph Cáceres is a first- generation queer NuyoRican writer. Growing up in the South Bronx during the mid 1980s and 1990s, he experienced firsthand how racism and homophobia were used to disenfranchise his community and sadly lost loved ones and neighbors during the HIV/ AIDS crisis. The Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996 left many suffering from poverty as well. As a result, this forced many people to come up with strategies of survival and creative methods of social protest. For the past twenty years, writing and teaching have been the platforms Cáceres chose to challenge and combat these forces of oppression. His work investigates the relationship between language, race, (homo)sexuality, and capitalism in America; particularly, the rhetorical strategies queer people of African and Caribbean descent historically used to resist/challenge Protestant values that promote heteronormative middle-class ideals, economic progress, white supremacy and social stratification in America. 

Cáceres’ work has been published in Slice, Cosmonauts Avenue, CURA, and Emerge: 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Joseph 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. An English PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies queer American artists of African and Caribbean descent, Joseph has received three Lost & Found: CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Archival Research Grants; CUNY’s Archival Research in African American & African Diaspora Studies Award; the Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Award; and the Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Doctoral Fellowship for his work with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project. He, along with Lois Elaine Griffith, the last surviving founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, co-edited an anthology memorializing the life and work of the Cafe’s founder, Miguel Algarín, Memorias de Miguel: The Hard Work of Love, which was published by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute in 2022. Joseph is currently working on several projects revolving around the unpublished works of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s queer founders.