[español abajo] Diarenis Calderón Tartabull I live on an island of beautiful greenwoods with blue-green waters towards the southern edge of the capital, being independent, occupying myself with issues and topics which make existence fluid. I share with people I know and ones that I don’t, close to them as a human being…

[español abajo] Dear Audre: I am writing you from an Afro-dystopian period. Right now, a pandemic is killing Black communities in the United States, and a similar fate can be seen for many of the Black and indigenous peoples in America. From here I write to thank you. I am a…

[español abajo] AnouchK Ibacka Valiente When I arrived in Berlin in 2009, I already knew of Audre Lorde. Nonetheless, I didn’t know her contribution to the building of the Afro-German community. I had the luck of being introduced to Audre’s work in my twenties in the 90s by a friend from Djibouti….

[español abajo] Conor Tomás ReedIn this incomparable epoch of endangered mortalities, distressed essential labors, mounting austerity waves, explosive opposition to the innate brutalities of policing, and social regenerations, the medicine I have sought the most is the writings of Audre Lorde. Our abolitionist pandemic poet laureate, Lorde dedicated her life to conjure radical dignity…

Short description: Practicing Distance is a multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine. In each part, Jeff Kasper offers a series of short practices, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined physical proximity during…

Short description: Practicing Distance is a multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine. In each part, artist Jeff Kasper offers a series of short practices* in blog-format, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined…

Music since Maidan Beginning in November of 2014, Ukraine was thrust into a three-month struggle, now known as the Revolution of Dignity. At the urging of journalist Mustafa Nayyem, students and young activists began gathering on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti or simply “Maidan”) to protest the government’s turn away from negotiations with the…

The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY seeks to build on the legacy of radical, de-colonial, anti-racist pedagogies at CUNY. A former CUNY educator, Audre Lorde’s teaching methods and practices are central to this legacy, and her vital work as a poet and activist continues to model survival and living for Black…

The VHS Archives working group has been meeting for the last 2 years at the Graduate Center, CUNY, to think through questions of archiving, preserving, and activating VHS material as a collective process. For the last three meetings, working group members host a ‘party,’ a communal “gathering of humans to work collectively and in real-time”…

Kyle Croft The Visual AIDS Archive Project was co-founded by painter Frank Moore and writer David Hirsh in 1994 to document the work of artists living with HIV, who were dying too quickly, too young, and without estate planning. In the twenty-five years since then, Visual AIDS has continued to work to preserve these…

Bibi Calderaro Mitigating climate change by 2050, if not earlier, has become the milestone goal for climate action for non-governmental and grassroots organizations and for some governmental agencies alike (at municipal, state and national / international levels) [1]. This goal depends on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 80%, particularly in the US….

Catherine Engh Last summer, Christina Katopodis and I decided that, as co-leaders of the Ecocriticism Working Group, we wanted to work on the creation of a climate change syllabus. We felt inspired by Ashley Dawson’s Climate Action Lab and wanted to supplement that initiative with one that would yield concrete contributions to climate change…

Kaitlin Mondello This is the inaugural year of the Climate Action Lab (CAL), a working group that brings together academic research, teaching and activism around issues affecting climate change, with a particular focus on our local communities in New York City. Our first topic of discussion was food. The seminar focused on presentations…

Image description: Four flyers hang beneath a string of lights that alternatively feature the words “stories” and “share!” Ugeita Tewari Why should our stories matter? Our stories define who we are. They are our identities, the experiences, and mistakes which have taught us valuable lessons. Indo-Caribbean Stories, held at the Richmond Hill branch…

Image description: The following text appears typewritten on a yellowed page, with torn and bent edges, “A SEASON IN HELL by Arthur Rimbaud * Englished by Muriel Rukeyser *” Christopher Clarke I’m fortunate to have been involved with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative for several years now. My interactions with…

Alexandra Juhasz For two years, the VHS Archives Working Group has brought together scholars, students, librarians, archivists, technologists, and community members to discuss and act upon questions and best practices about the use, preservation, digitization, and research of VHS collections that are held by organizations, scholars, artists, and activists. In the 2017-2018 academic…

Harry Blain Getting one artist to settle on a concept is hard enough. How, then, can eight—each from different disciplinary backgrounds—not only find some unity of thought, but a final conceptual product? This was the near-herculean challenge facing the team of researchers developing artist Mariam Ghani’s project Dis-Ease through the Center for Humanities,…

Corinna Mullin January 2008 saw the start of a major uprising in Tunisia’s Gafsa mining basin. Unemployed youth, dissident trade unionists, family members of the unemployed, teachers as well as activists and workers from other sectors of the economy took to the streets to express their discontent with the corrupt hiring practices of the…

Daisy Atterbury & Maxine Krenzel In Spring of 2018, two first-year writing classrooms at Brooklyn and Queens College embarked on a semester-long peer-to-peer writing exchange inspired by Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials published in “What We Are Part Of: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974” through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, as part of…

Sara Nović On September 13th, eleven floors above the bustle of midtown, a collection of Deaf poets, artists, scholars and students met alongside hearing publishing professionals to discuss the nature of ASL poetry and how it might best be sent out into the world. When it came time for DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark…

By Jamara Wakefield It’s 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. I check my mailbox and see an unfamiliar envelope. I open it. I stop and stare at the document, attempting to piece together the words in front of me. My name. Taxes. State of New York. Civil Warrant. Time freezes. The word warrant flashes over…

By Aisha “Li” Cousins Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us, Facing the rising sun of our new day begunLet us march on till victory is won. — Lift Every Voice and Sing…

My Planning Fellowship with the 2018 Reclaimed Lands Conference Christine Stoddard It’s been a long time since I participated in a science fair. But when I applied for a planning fellowship with the 2018 Reclaimed Lands Conference, I knew I wasn’t signing up for any old science fair. As an M.F.A. student in…

As part of The City Amplified research team in the Seminar on Public Engagement & Collaborative Research, independent study student Lauren Capellan interned with community partner The Laundromat Project. Below is Lauren’s account of her internship. Activism in Kelly Street Truthfully this project began with the selfish tendency of not wanting to go…