by Ria Banerjee, Sarah Hoiland, and María Julia Rossi

As educators, we are typically impelled to produce content–course plans, public lectures, writing and speaking in various registers is central to what we routinely do. It is rarer for us to get opportunities to “fill the well,” so to speak, and a TLH grant provided us a forum to develop our understanding of contemporary fiction that is outside our disciplinary subfields but aligns with our interests. After discussion among a core group of five planning faculty (Julia, Ria, and Sarah are the names on record for this group of CUNY friends), we decided on some ideal parameters for our planned event: we wanted to read recent novels by women of color, intentionally working against the Anglophone publishing industry’s bias, and we chose works focused on the US with an eye on global interconnectivity. We wanted to attract participants from a range of work and professional experiences, as having only educators might narrow our conversation. Finally, we wanted to give space to student voices in designing and leading our discussions, again to foster a broad conversation that would not be possible at, say, a disciplinary conference. We settled on three particularly timely novels. 

In distinct ways, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (2019) speak to the stresses and challenges of US citizenship in transatlantic, continental, and transcultural terms. They are carefully crafted novels, widely recognized for their literary qualities. And, they are social novels as well as philosophical and historical ones. We agreed that it would be useful to read these novels carefully, as some of us intend to incorporate them into the courses we teach in future. But even more importantly, all three novels looked fun, intellectually and emotionally stimulating in a pandemic semester when most of our colleagues, students, and friends are working under very strained conditions. 

The primacy of storytelling in both Homegoing and Lost Children Archive weaves history into contemporary journeys of what it means for characters to return home and what even constitutes our ideas of “home”. Our third meeting will take place at the end of May, but the first two novels’ shared interest in historical contexts and their desire to archive public and personal recollections allowed our reading and discussion group to make connections across these very different texts. Both authored by young women of color, the novels pushed us to consider the authors as allies or fellow travelers with deeply personal connections of their own to the subjects raised in their writing: the transatlantic slave trade in Gyasi’s writing and the migrant crisis at the US southern border in Luiselli’s. 

In Homegoing, Gyasi materializes intergenerational trauma through two necklaces that are passed down from mother to daughter, one that remains in the family and another that is lost when a young woman is sold into slavery. In Lost Children Archive, Luiselli creates fictional archives that are literally and symbolically unpacked on a family’s cross-country journey to record the echoes of our past and to retrace migrant children who are lost. By tracking the development of narrative objects as symbols, and of shared textual tropes like motherhood and the inheritance of intergenerational trauma, our reading group has come to understand each work as a stop on a longer textual journey that we are taking together. 

In addition to one faculty leader for each session, Hostos and Kingsborough Community College alumna (subsequently at Hunter, Baruch, Brooklyn and the GC), have served as co-facilitators for each session. Isatou Batchilly, Denise Herrera, and Jozette Belmont have had deeply personal reactions to the novels, and offered complementary discussions of identity politics that restored a certain immediacy to our sessions. We did not intend to have purely academic discussions, and our co-discussants add their perspectives as political campaigners and social workers whose professional lives intersect with textual content. Through interactive icebreaker activities drawn from questions raised by the novels, the 40 participants in Women Rewrite America were asked to co-create a digital archive of our experience of reading together. These introductory activities proved to be effective for a large group of strangers coming from all over the US and a variety of academic and nonacademic roles, united only by an interest in the reading material. For faculty participants, this translates into an activity that can be easily adapted for the classroom. TLH made it possible for us to invite one of the authors, Valeria Luiselli, to attend a session, adding fresh depth to her personal and political involvement with issues that are important in our own intellectual and work lives. 

It is difficult to provide culminating thoughts on our experience because, well, the series ends at the end of this month. But aside from logistical reasons, coming to a quick summative response is contrary to our purpose when planning this 3-part, 3-month event. In the past few years, there have been several strong arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and economists embracing slow thinking or “doing nothing.” Vincenzo Di Nicola compares Slow Thought to the Slow Food movement, arguing that slow thinking “is preservative rather than conservative,” and “founds a kind of contemporary commune” in which participants might respond to their own time and place while also “spreading organically as communities assert their particular needs for belonging and continuity against the onslaught of faceless government bureaucracy and multinational interests.” Writing more recently from the middle of the pandemic, Apoorva Tadepalli asks us to resist the urge to always be doing something. Do nothing, she urges; consider the pandemic “an opportunity not to ‘get your life back on track,’… but to experiment with nothingness, with a failure of productivity.” 

Breaking away from the relentlessly positive self-help rhetoric that saturates US popular media (and also perhaps US academia!), Tadepalli recommends that we “do nothing” except take time to try and find our own humanity, “tell and listen to stories.” This is no easy task in itself, as many who are working from home will attest. Still, both Di Nicola and Tadepalli speak to a tacit purpose behind our reading and discussion series to create time and space to just read and interact. What the fruits of such an exercise will be remains, happily, to be determined.   

Ria Banerjee is an Associate Professor of English at Guttman Community College. 

Sarah Hoiland is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hostos Community College. 

María Julia Rossi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at John Jay College.

by Raquel Corona and Susan Lago

On May 13, 2021, Raquel Corona and Susan Lago will host a live interactive literary event on Zoom, featuring Queensborough Community College English Department faculty, including Irvin Weathersby Jr. and Manny Martinez, along with three QCC students nominated to read by the English Department Creative Writing Committee. Attendees will actively participate by collaborating on a group poem, posing questions, and meeting with the writers for intimate break-out room sessions. The event will conclude with an open mic where attendees have the opportunity to volunteer to share their own creative work with the audience. In this way, attendees will have the experience of participating in a live literary event that invites the audience to engage directly with writers of various levels of experience to ask questions about their process or what inspires their creative work. Attendees will gather an understanding of the interactive nature between literature and audience in a venue that takes literature out of the classroom and places it in a collaborative virtual space.

 In May 2019, the Queensborough Community College English Department Creative Writing Committee held its first annual QCC Writers’ Showcase. Faculty writers from across the disciplines were invited to read from their published creative work, including poetry, fiction, memoir, drama, hybrid, cross-genre, or graphic novels. The purpose of the event was to provide an opportunity for writers to share their writing experiences with students and the QCC community. The event featured three faculty members and two students who were recommended by the Creative Writing Committee. The first hour was devoted to writers reading from their work and was followed by a 45-minute Q&A. Having students and faculty read together at a live literary performance was a unique way for the QCC community to engage directly with writers and helped to facilitate the understanding that writing is an active process of creative expression and communication that also happens outside of the classroom.

In May 2020, the live event was canceled due to COVID-19. Faculty and student readers, however, created videos of themselves reading their works, which were shared with the QCC campus community. Showcasing creative works virtually thus became a way to demonstrate the power of creative expression even in times of crisis. While faculty read from previously published works, students contributed spoken word and poetry having to do with the pandemic.

This year, we wanted to make the program more interactive on a virtual platform. When we heard about the Transformative Learning in the Humanities Grant, we came up with a proposal to utilize the functions of Zoom to create a unique collaborative, interactive space that celebrates spoken and written creative expression. We thought it would be wonderful if we could use the digital platform to give the audience that intimate experience with the writers so they could feel more comfortable engaging in conversation with them about their work. Our goal is to split the audience in two separate break-out rooms and then facilitate discussion within that space so the audience feels comfortable commenting on or asking any questions they may have of the writers.

We also wanted the audience to have the opportunity to engage in writing and perform as well. What better way to truly showcase creativity than to have the audience exercise their own? We plan to start the entire event with a poetry writing exercise where participants are given a prompt, and they reply in the chat feature of Zoom. We will compile what everyone puts in the chat and read it out loud at the end so they can see how we all came together to construct a poem virtually. Finally, we will invite attendees to perform their own poetry or creative work for a few minutes at the end. We have been working with our colleagues on the Creative Writing Committee to see if we can have a few of their students attend and perform in case participants are initially too shy. We hope being able to see one or two other people volunteer will provide others some courage to read their work.

Because our event has not yet occurred we cannot discuss in more detail or provide images of anything that happens at the event. However, we wanted to make sure to include in this blog post the line-up of the writers showcased in our event. They are truly a diverse set of individuals who we are so excited to bring together. Below you will find a photo and brief description of who they are and what they intend to read at the event.

Author Bios

Susan Lago is a Lecturer in the English Department at CUNY / Queensborough Community College. Her creative work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as Noctua Review, Adelaide Magazine, Pank Magazine, The Smart Set,  Monkeybicycle and Prime Number. She is currently at work on a collection of connected short stories. Visit her website at http://SusanLago.wix.com/susanlago or follow her on Twitter: @SusanLago).

Raquel Corona is a Lecturer in the English Department at Queensborough Community College (CUNY) and has just recently completed her Ph.D. in English from St. John’s University (yay for Class of 2021). Her dissertation is a rhetorical exploration of how transnationalism affects the circulation of stories about the Latinx woman’s body and sex. It examines various texts and the digital realm to consider the ways Latinx women are resisting against the dominant and oppressive forces in their lives to cull an alternative way of expressing and exploring their sexuality and sexual desire.

Strategies for Publishing Articles and Preparing your Future Book was a workshop led by Prof. Araceli Tinajero (The City College of NY) on April 9, 2021, from 5:00 to 6:30 pm. The event was sponsored by Transformative Learning in the Humanities. Graduate students and an Assistant Professor were present. I had encouraged the participants to hand in a 150-word abstract (or summary) of the paper, dissertation, or collection that they would like to publish so they could share it with other audience members. No one brought their abstract/summary; however, when the attendees were in the breakout rooms, they carried out very interesting discussions.

The workshop was aimed to provide basic examples. Since I am a professor of literature, I furnished examples of how to begin publishing in the Humanities (I gave examples of journals at CUNY).  Below is the outline of what I presented. We had excellent discussions and promised to follow up via email to continue the dialogue.

Transforming papers into articles:

1. If you don’t want your professor’s advice, find a professor outside your college and have her/him read your paper.
2. If you are still not convinced, ask a friend you can trust.
3. Don’t be afraid of criticism.
4. Remember, you don’t have to change everything the reader asks you to change.
5. You can combine 2 papers: one from one class with another from another class.

Preparing your abstract or summary:

1. Be coherent and clear. Imagine that your reader doesn’t know anything about your topic. Even your theoretical framework has to be clear.

Publishing articles:

Stop! Before you send a paper to be considered, you must be familiar with the journal. Example: Ciberletras http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras

1. Your professors are the experts in their field. Ask them for a list of peer-reviewed journals.
2. When an author submits an article, the editors of the peer-reviewed journal will contact two readers experts in the field. Each reader will evaluate your article. The editor will get back to you with suggested revisions or, if the readers reject your paper, you have to approach another journal.
3. Not ready to publish in a peer-reviewed journal? There are several prestigious journals and magazines. Many are published by university departments:

Fiction – English department @  CCNY:

Fiction – Facebook

Promethean – Facebook

On-line Journals:

• • Cervantes– Official journal of the Cervantes Society of America
  • CiberLetras– Journal of literary criticism and culture
  • Dieciocho– Eighteenth-century studies in Spain and Latin America
  • Espéculo– Electronic journal of literary studies
  • Enclave– Journal dedicated to sharing the work of Spanish literary work from CUNY and New York.
  • Hispanista– Primera revista electrónica de los hispanistas de Brazil.
  • Laberinto– Spanish and Spanish-American texts from the early modern period, 1450-1750
  • Lemir– Journal dedicated to Spanish Medieval and Renaissance Literature
  • LLJournal– Journal of the Students of The Ph.D. Program in Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, The Graduate Center

4. Not ready to publish an article? Try writing a book review.

Publishing your dissertation:

1. Think big & plan ahead. This book is a must
2. You must focus. Don’t compromise with anything that is outside of the topic that you are writing.
3. Again, ask your professors about the publishers.
4. Study the publications, the editorial board, and their expectations.University presses = demanding and can be slow

   You can find a list of academic publishers here: https://humanitiesjournals.fandom.com/wiki/university_presses_/academic_publishers

5. Study thoroughly the guidelines and submit them on time

Publishing a book outside your discipline:

1. Look for the experts on your campus or approach professors from other institutions.
2. For example, I want to write a biography…. do you know that there is a biography and memoir program at the graduate center? The experts are there. Ask them.
3. Do you want to write children’s books? Get in touch with the English department and ask the chair if someone is teaching about children’s literature. Get in touch with the professor.

by Emily Raboteau

This event was sponsored by a grant from Transformative Learning in the Humanities at the City University of New York and designed for emerging creative writers interested in learning more about the business of publication. It was conducted as a conversation between myself and author / editor Morgan Jerkins about her own path to publication, insight as an editor, use of social media as a networking tool, overview of the publishing landscape and tips on querying literary agents fo representation. The audience consisted of MFA students from CUNY and was open to the public.

I started the program by welcoming the audience: “Many of you are in MFA programs and have been working hard on your craft in writing workshop, honoring your ambition to be a published writer. Others of you have been working independently on your writing, with the same goal. But when do you know your work is ready to be published? How and where should you submit? Which are the right venues for your voice? Who are your potential readers? What is the best way to query an agent or an editor? How much can you expect to be paid for your creative writing? Why does understanding the publishing marketplace matter? You’re here to learn from the talented writer and editor, Morgan Jerkins in conversation me, writer and City College creative writing professor, Emily Raboteau, in a nuts and bolts conversation about the professional practice of writing.”

I then introduced our guest speaker: “Morgan Jerkins is a New York Times bestselling author and Senior Editor at ESPN’s “The Undefeated” for its Culture Vertical. Her books include This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, which was longlisted for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Wandering In Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. Her amazing third book, Caul Baby: A Novel comes out from Harper Books this spring. Morgan, one of the things I admire about your career is that you’ve worked in more than one genre, and also served so many writers as an editor, including myself, in your capacity as an editor at Zora Magazine. Walk us through your path from MFA to where you are now, including your influences as a writer.”

Morgan spoke for 25 minutes about her journey to publication, starting as an undergraduate student, including the ups and downs, the rejections, and her discovery of her voice and place as a culture maker starting in 2015 on social media, citing Roxane Gay as having opened the door for her, and finishing with a recap of her first national book tour.

I then asked her a series of questions, which I had gathered from the audience in advance. These centered around the pros and cons of self publishing, independent publishing, the role of an agent and the process of acquiring one, pointers for successful query letters, establishing voice, dealing with editorial conflicts, networking, publishing resources, and authorial “branding.”

Morgan insightfully answered these questions, sharing resources via the chat.

Emily Raboteau is the 2020-2021 Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York.

by Jamie Warren and Mahatapa Palit

In this workshop, we began by inviting participants to turn their external scholarly gaze, at least for a moment, inward. Starting from the premise that, if our goal is to increase critical thought and knowledge among our students, we must first come to understand ourselves, we emphasized the necessity of engaging in the often discomforting analysis of our language, and our assumptions, our position, and perhaps most importantly what we mean we say words such as “I”, or “we.” What images of others do such utterances implicitly conjure for the mind? Who, exactly, inhabits the linguistic space, “You” or “them”? Moreover, how can this rather abstract process of self cataloging help us in our goal of bringing new knowledge on poverty to the center of our pedagogy?

Consider, the following three quotes, each produced in the mid-1980s, a period well remembered for it’s urban decay, Industrial fallout, and economic policies which sought to eliminate any remnants of the New Deal or the Great Society:

 “God is smiling on you, but he’s frowning too

Only God knows what you’ll go through.” Grandmaster Flash, “The Message,” 1982

“Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground

You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much, spend half your life just covering up.”

Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA,” 1986

“Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.” Audrey Lorde, in conversation with James Baldwin, 1984.

When I read these three artists along side one another, I am struck by an important difference in the words of Audre Lorde from those of the men. While all three artists are speaking directly on the suffering experienced by poor people in America, and two also point to the increased pain resulting from white supremacy, only one refrains from the using the word/idea “you.” In her articulation of the violence and symbolic erasure waged against the poor, importantly, Lorde used the word, “me.” Poverty is not elsewhere in her words. There is no universal, abstracted, and therefore meaningless “you” invoked so that we might perform a public display of our benevolence. There is no distance. Perhaps more importantly, when speaking to politics of knowledge and the dangerous epistemologies that undergird so much social policy on the poor, Audre Lorde offers no forgiveness. To study her is to destroy her. Thankfully, Lorde lived her life in careful diligence to own selfhood, self-naming, and protected above all else, her voice and her ability to say the word “I.”

As we each embark in the useful and important process of transforming our courses to increase our students understanding of the historical, structural, and political causes of poverty, it is crucial that we remember this lesson from Lorde. Put in very simple terms, when we teach on issues of poverty, we must find ways, both in method and in discourse, to resist placing the poor under the microscope, treating them as objects to be known. Given the fact that the vast majority of our students live daily through the very real pain and violence of being poor, we must teach them how to say “I”, to examine who constitutes their “we,” and to not think of themselves simply as things to be known, but as knowers. Only then can our classrooms become a place where those living in poverty can truly feel at home, and know on the deepest level, that our desire to eliminate poverty is not just different from, but actually at war with the desires Lorde named above—those which sought to wipe her out.

Summary of Jamie’s lecture & Mahatapa’s Assignment

My colleague, Jamie Warren, professor of history, presented at the workshop on Transformative Learning in the Humanities held at CUNY in March 2021, starting her lecture with this quote:” The act of doing history is fundamentally an act of empathy.” She used her own life story growing up white and poor to help destigmatize poverty and make the discussion of poverty and its roots natural and a way to interrogate the real problem of structural barriers. Through a close look at history, she discussed how she enabled her students understand how after slavery, during the reconstruction era, Blacks did well economically and in terms of social mobility, with progressive education, community activism, and learning about democracy. However, the Jim Crow era that followed led to great discrimination of Blacks and turned back the progress that had been achieved. Through the study of history, she questioned the myth that blacks were inherently low achievers because of legacies of slavery. Her goals for the TLH presentation were:

1. To locate/understand students’ understanding of the causes of poverty.
2. To explore how many of us unintentionally accept/reproduce biased and negative ideas about poor people.
3. To help shift the focus toward structural barriers and the elite.
4. To examine places in my own teaching/course design that unintentionally reproduced problematic myths about poverty.
5. Relocate the position of the subject/knower.

As a business professor, my goal in attending Prof. Warren’s workshop on Voicing Poverty was to enable my students to look at business from a more humanistic perspective. My principal goal in teaching marketing is to help students understand the creative problem-solving process that underlies marketing practice. Typically, in my classes, I do not talk about poverty, nor the structural barriers that people in poverty face. My students like to apply the principles of marketing that they study in my class to solve consumer problems related to fitness, beauty, fashion, food, and the internet of things. However, is it not true that poverty is one of the biggest problems that society faces? Hasn’t the pandemic widened the gap between haves and have nots? Should we disregard it, and instead focus only on shiny objects? 

My students know poverty well. 67% of BMCC students received federal financial aid in 2109. 70% of community college students face a combination of food and housing insecurity. I wondered what their experience would be if they applied marketing principles to solve problems related to poverty in their own communities?

Inspired by Prof. Warren’s presentation, I decided to set two new goals for my marketing class. One, to build empathy in the classroom where poverty and life could be discussed in a more human way; and two, to encourage my students to look at creative ways to solve social problems emanating from poverty, yet being careful that we do not stigmatize these problems.

Goal 1: Building Empathy

While some people think of business as a way to make profit, I tend to take more of a view that business is a ‘force for the good of society’ that can help keep economies strong and citizens taken care of with resourcefulness and creativity. I would like my students as future business professionals learn to work collaboratively and with empathy. To set this new tone, I planned to start the class by taking two minutes on Zoom having students check in with each other responding to two questions: (1) What are we grateful for today? and, (2) What did not go well? Students would post their own response on the chat, and, also, respond to some of their fellow students. In addition to building empathy, I believe this would create a sense of belongingness and community in the classroom. 

Goal 2: Solving Social problems

My second adaptation would be for students to introspect on social problems they saw in their communities and choose to creatively problem-solve one that resonated most deeply with them.

I would like to set the stage by having my students look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals that focus on the world’s biggest problems and go over a few innovative solutions that organizations have developed to address these “wicked” problems. 

In this new semester-long project in my Introduction to Marketing class, students would:

1. Discuss types of social problems related to poverty: Gun/Gang violence; Homelessness; Joblessness; Education-gap among new immigrants.
2. Go on a community walk to observe problems that were manifest in their neighborhood. 
3. Research the breadth and depth of the problem and explore databases such as Infoshare and local newspapers to understand the significance of the problem in their neighborhood. 
4. Brainstorm potential solutions with their team. 
5. Practice empathy as they learn the basics of design-thinking for solving social problems.
6. Interview people wrestling with these problems in their neighborhood to understand their needs. 
7. Build empathy maps based on the interviews and discuss what the interviewees said, felt, thought, and did. 
8. Check whether the assumptions that they had ahead of the interview on the perceived roots of the problem were validated or if there were surprises.
9. Unpack the insights that they received from the interviews and consider if this would require them to modify their initial solutions? 
10. Watch, as a team, the documentary ‘The Line: Poverty in America’ by Linda Midgett (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHyNBGIFYl8  and then discuss the structural issues that were at the root of the social problems that they were tackling.
11. Create a social media campaign to advocate for change to solve the problem.
12. Present their findings on the needs of their community and their plans for a social media campaign to their local community boards, taking on the role of citizen-researchers.

Even as I pilot the assignment in my class this semester, I have begun to notice a few positive outcomes. Sejlan (name changed), a student with accessibility needs came to speak to me at the start of this semester.  He was nervous. It was his first semester in college, and he was not sure if college was for him. He chose to work on a project focused on Homelessness. Sejilan had worked as a RA at a Homeless shelter and felt that the residents would be more likely to stay in the shelter if they had freedom to cook their own food, invite guests, have recreational facilities, and learn some trade such as culinary skills or graphic design that could help them get jobs. He went through the initial steps of his project meeting with me quite frequently and as he completed his interviews, I noticed a change in his voice. He was beginning to sound more confident as he discussed the pros and cons of his recommendations. As he finds his stride as a citizen-researcher with strong roots in his community, I hope that he will not only complete this class and get his associates degree, but that one day, perhaps, he will take on a managerial role in running a shelter.