Manifold: CUNY Pedagogy Series & Light Relief

Lost & Found Digital Publications on Manifold: CUNY Pedagogy Series and Light Relief 

Lost & Found texts from our CUNY Pedagogy Series of archival materials from Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara and Adrienne Rich are now available online as digital publications for custom classroom use, self-study, and group engagement on CUNY Manifold.

Manifold publishes dynamic digital texts with rich media support, powerful annotation tools, and robust community dialogue: a perfect virtual home for Lost & Found, born out of and flowing into relationships between poets, thinkers, and their broader contexts. Lost & Found is a living archive, and the publications available on Manifold are living digital works.

CUNY Pedagogy Series

Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974, Parts I & II

Author: Adrienne Rich

Contributors: Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, Erica Kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Wendy Tronrud, Ammiel Alcalay

In this collective effort, a team of Lost & Found editors explore Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials from her formative years during the turbulent and exhilarating student strike for Open Admissions in the late 1960s at the City University of New York. Drawing on memos, notes, course syllabi, and class exercises, this collection provides insight into Rich’s dedication, passion, and empathy as a teacher completely dedicated to her students as they take a leading role in reshaping access to public higher education. Rich’s characteristic public generosity and courage can be seen, for the first time, in an institutional setting through these materials. Accompanied by essays that contextualize both the pedagogy and the politics, this collection truly breaks new ground in presenting lesser-known aspects of a major poet’s work.

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“REALIZING THE DREAM OF A BLACK UNIVERSITY” & OTHER WRITINGS PARTS 1 & 2

Author: Toni Cade Bambara

Contributors: Makeba Lavan, Conor Tomás Reed

While Toni Cade Bambara is mostly known for her short stories, novels, and landmark 1970 anthology The Black Woman, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University,” & Other Writings explores lesser-known aspects of her work and revives her far-reaching pedagogical legacy. Through memoirs and texts drawn from City College of New York’s radical 1960s educational experiments, we learn how Bambara dedicated her life to embedding and expanding Black and Third World studies in academic institutions, community settings, and the larger collective consciousness while imbuing these efforts with her own unique form of infectious activism and unflinching clarity.

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“I TEACH MYSELF IN OUTLINE,” NOTES, JOURNALS, SYLLABI & AN EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA

Author: Audre Lorde

Contributors: Iemanjá Brown, Miriam Atkin

“I teach myself in outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha, is a collection of Audre Lorde’s teaching materials from her time as an instructor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College, which spanned the years of 1970-1985. The volume also includes a chapter of Lorde’s unpublished novel Deotha, and an editors’ introduction that elucidates Lorde’s teaching philosophy through an in-depth look at her classroom documents.

June Jordan: “Life Studies,” 1966-1976

Author: June Jordan

Contributors: Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Editors: Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev

Though many aspects of June Jordan’s unique and dynamic forms of work and activism have been well documented, “Life Studies,” traces a through line of her creative interventions to form a fuller portrait of her complex and interrelated engagements. Through essays and policy reports from her days as a housing activist, speeches, her work with children, and texts from her time at City College of New York, this project adds new layers to Jordan’s legacy, showing how she created “living room” to enact a broad array of “life studies” that had great effect on many people in very different institutional, communal, and public settings.

Selected Archives:

Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Collections

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Light Relief Series on Manifold

During the pandemic,Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative has centered its energies on keeping creativity and connection alive in our extended community. Grounded in collectivity, friendship, archival recovery, and collaboration, our publishing practice is driven by a deeply felt belief that poetry has the power to transform the way we understand and act in and on the worlds we inhabit. In some ways, this ethos readied us to respond when faced with the compounding duress of COVID times.

In the early weeks, we sent out a call for Lost & Found: Light Relief. A WPA-inspired system to distribute resources to our community, we asked CUNY and Lost & Found-affiliated poets/writers, archivists/scholars, and students/artists to dive into their own personal archives to publish short-form digital works. We sought readily available fragments from works in progress, or works completed, rather than new work, hoping to render Light Relief, a light lift for contributors.

The work we received was dynamic and enthralling. From earliest stages of a forming thought, to fragments of research, or finished pieces, all of the work contributed is steeped in the spirit of Lost & Found—a perseverance through uncertain times via poetry and collectivity. The kind of work presented in Light Relief needed to be housed on a platform that allows these works to exist as dynamically as they are, so Lost & Found teamed up with CUNY’s Manifold team to launch all five Series of Light Relief as well as publications by Audre Lorde and June Jordan from our publication series.

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

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