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

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

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

Miriam Atkin, Iemanjá Brown, Editors

SERIES 7, NUMBER 1, FALL 2017 GENERAL EDITOR Ammiel Alcalay

TEXTUAL CONSULTANT EMERITUS David Greetham

CONSULTING EDITOR Kate Tarlow Morgan

MANAGING EDITOR Stephon Lawrence

PUBLISHER Kendra Sullivan

PUBLICITY COORDINATOR Sampson Starkweather

DESIGN Megan Mangum (wordsthatwork.net) All materials listed below are from the Audre Lorde Papers; Spelman College Archives: “Classrooms,” Series 2.4 Box 24 Folder 13; “Race and the Urban Situation,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals; History/lit 210,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals; Hist/lit suggested readings,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 25; “Racist Society,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals” (All materials with month and day but no year), Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals” (“In your daily life, etc.”), Series 10 Box 83 Folder 26; “Course Proposals,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 5; “The other woman,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 49; “Proposal for faculty seminar,” Series 2.1 Box 18 Folder 135; “Dream,” Series 2.5 Box 45; “Journals number 13,” “Deotha,” Series 2.1 Box 17 Folder 88.

Copyright © by the Estate of Audre Lorde (2017); used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, The Provost’s Office at the Graduate Center,CUNY , Early Research Initiative, the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund, André Spears, Margo & Anthony Viscusi, and Engaging the Senses Foundation. TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1 A NOTE ON THE TEXTS 15 THE CLASSROOMS 17 SYLLABI, TEACHING JOURNALS, NOTES, AND COURSE PROPOSALS FROM JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE Race & the Urban Situation [Undated] 18 History/Literature 210, (1971) 20 Teaching Journals, Notes, and Course Proposals 25 SYLLABI, OUTLINES, AND TEACHING NOTES FROM HUNTER COLLEGE The Other Woman: Lesbian Voices in 20th Century 35 American Literature (1985) Proposal for Faculty Seminar at Hunter on Race [Undated] 40 Dream Journal (1975) 42 EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA: “BATH/SCHOOL/PIA” 43 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 66 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 69 LOST & FOUND 72

INTRODUCTION

I. IN 1968, AUDRE LORDE served as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black liberal arts institution founded in 1869 outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Situated on a campus continually besieged by organized racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen’s Council, the students were politically active in the face of this violence. The experience proved transformative: “I came to realize that teaching and writing were inextricably combined, and it was there that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” Upon returning to New York City, Lorde was invited to join a cadre of poet-teachers—including Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, Addison Gayle, David Henderson, June Jordan and Adrienne Rich—who were working in the SEEK program at City College in Harlem. SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) promoted the matriculation of racially, economically and educationally marginalized high school graduates at CUNY colleges. In her second semester with SEEK, she saw the rise of student movements for equality and access, culminating in the 1969 Open Admissions strike, and demands that CUNY incorporate Ethnic Studies departments as well as open its doors to all New York City high school graduates. Lorde was one of a number of instructors who supported the strike. For the duration of the uprising, she held class offsite at a nearby middle school, re-named “Harlem University” by student activists.

 Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 161.  For a more in-depth account of the events leading up to the Open Admissions strike at CUNY, see Conor Tomás Reed’s essay, “‘Treasures that Prevail’: Adrienne Rich, The SEEK Program, and Social Movements at the City College of New York, 1968-1972” in “What We are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974 from Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Series IV (Fall 2013).

 In the fall of 1969, Lorde began working in the Lehman College Education Department as an instructor of new teachers in the New York City public high school system. She taught a course called “Race and Education” to mostly white female students learning to teach the predominantly Black population of the local public schools. Though Lorde designed the course to help each student excavate her own internal prejudices, her work at Lehman was severely limited and she yearned to be teaching in a different environment. She pitched a course to the dean of another CUNY school, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, leading to her employment as the first Black member of the English Department. Under pressure from student movements, John Jay had recently redefined itself as not only a college for police science, but also a broadly inclusive liberal arts school. Energized by the tension in her classrooms comprised of white, Black and Puerto Rican humanities majors alongside police officers and officers-in-training, Lorde dove into the struggle to establish a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at John Jay.

II. The teaching materials published here document Lorde’s daily engagement with the “mechanics of oppression” in the context of an institution established to train police officers. Endemic police corruption made headlines in this period, while whistleblowers like Frank Serpico risked being killed by going public. At the same time, a number of Black radical activists armed themselves against both drug dealers and the NYPD. In this climate, she wrote the poem “Power” which responds to the 1973 murder of a ten-year-old Black child named Clifford Glover at the hands of a white police officer, who was acquitted of his crime. The officer, Thomas J. Shea, was a John Jay College student during Lorde’s time there. In an interview

 with friend and colleague Adrienne Rich, Lorde described her fury at knowing she might have seen Shea—or perhaps someone just like him—in the hallways or even in her classroom. In “Apartheid USA,” Lorde asks, in relation to the countless deaths at the hands of the police, “How does a system bent upon our ultimate destruction make the unacceptable gradually tolerable?” Lorde continues to ask herself, and others, about how to effectively stand up to oppressive structures. In the classroom, she teaches students how structural inequality over-determines the life of the individual. She helps them first explore their emotional lives and then work toward understanding themselves within those larger structures. By devoting significant attention to her students’ emotional lives, Lorde makes learning a process of individuation, which can build deep self-knowledge and understanding. She writes in her class notes that “if each of us is to survive, [we each need] acute self-awareness—definition—who am I?” She continues to carve out these opportunities by dismantling “myths that divide,” prompting students to consider the ways in which pervasive constructions like “the American dream” are divisive. As Lorde moves through the internalization of structures and stereotypes in her course outline, she asks, “who d’ya think you are?” and “who am I so who are you?” These questions do not prompt the kind of individualism that serves “the interest of a capitalist profit system” but rather bring people closer to collective liberation. Lorde’s insistence upon the importance of the “I” was felt in her relationship to her students. In summer 2017, we interviewed

 Audre Lorde, “Apartheid USA,” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 32.  Audre Lorde, “Sadomasochism: Not about Condemnation,” in A Burst of Light, (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 114.

 some of Lorde’s Hunter students. Anthropologist and Hunter College professor Jacqueline Brown participated in a poetry course that Lorde taught in 1986 specifically for women of color. She recalls Lorde being “open to us expressing the full, complicated gamut of our experience. She was receptive to whatever we brought to the table, including erotica and our joys as women of color forming community with each other.” That class was featured in the documentary, Litany for Survival, where Lorde is seen teaching to enraptured students. Brown emphasized that Lorde wore comfortably the aura of power with which she is often associated, but was also such a present listener and teacher that “she made you feel, when you were talking to her, that there was no place she’d rather be.” The queer novelist, essayist and activist Sarah Schulman recalls a similar generosity in Lorde’s teaching, even as it unrelentingly pushed students to go deeper in their explorations. Schulman remembers Lorde organizing her packed class into one large circle and standing in the center to teach. By the second class, she had learned all the students’ names and as she taught, she would make eye contact with specific students, referencing an idea from their papers or from a previous class discussion. Though Lorde foregrounded individuality, her attention to structural racism undercuts a pervasive sociological tendency to diagnose all social, economic, and psychological issues as individual, personal, and familial failures. What we see in Lorde’s assigned and recommended readings of, for example, Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, and the quotations of Laing’s poetry on the syllabus, is a deep resistance to pathology of the individual. Lorde instead assigns a surprising number of psychological studies of race and racism, focusing on psychology—personal and collective—as useful for understanding structural racism, colonialism, and capitalist destruction. She urges her students to identify their own struggles within larger political and

 economic structures and sets them up to find ways in their everyday lives to move toward action. Lorde tells Rich that, “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.” This incitement helps to dissolve the boundaries between the classroom and the streets—raising the stakes of learning to a question of survival. At the end of “Race and the Urban Situation,” she does not simply identify the problem of “your foot on my neck or my foot on your neck;” she puts a colon after that problem and asks for “other choices” that lead out, away from competition and disunity, to community and action. From “other choices,” Lorde inspects “the here and now,” asking “can we separate ideology & values from action?” Imploring her students to consider theory and action together, Lorde’s notes leave open the possibility that she will examine not just racist ideology and its presence around us, but also alternative ideologies that can produce real resistance, and reverberate beyond the individual. Lorde’s class notes pose the question to her students, “How can you alter these effects in yourself—in the world around you?” The effects of racism exist on an individual level, and can be changed there, but always in service to “the world around” us.

III. Lorde’s personal journal entries, reproduced here, show her disrupting the boundaries between student and teacher, making each vulnerable to the other and employing intimacy, hostility, and vulnerability as pedagogical tools. Lorde’s notes show her taking on the role of participant observer. She considers the physical well-being of her students and their relations to each other, keeping copious records

 Audre Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Sister Outsider, (Berkley: Crossing Press, 1984), 98.

 that reflect such observations as “G. is tired—can’t relate to B.” She remarks in “Poet as Teacher-Human as Poet-Teacher as Human” that “feeling myself and the perception of and reaction to the feelings of other human beings” is the “exchange which is the most strongly prohibited, or discouraged, human exercise of our time.” Part of this intimacy for Lorde is confrontation; she watches her students disagree or feel uncomfortable and documents it. In one of her handwritten class notes she writes, “A. has made a statement that has colored J.’s attitude toward him. She has confronted him with it.” These observations trace Lorde’s immersion in a charged exchange of feeling between students, part of her willful embrace of an intimacy that the space of teaching generally prohibits. Lorde’s journals also provide a record of how her pedagogy intentionally violated her own authority, rejecting the license that is bestowed when one steps into the role of teacher, to administer a single-authored, goal-oriented course of knowledge. In one of those journals she asks: “9 classes so far/time for feedback/why do you think I am here/how do you feel about class—are you satisfied—where do you think we are going?” This question pulls into the content of the class a possible reassessment of how the university distributes power, stirring students to consider what it means to have a Black woman as their professor, and what the stakes are for her to be teaching a class on race at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This willingness to be vulnerable to her students resonates in her interview with Rich. There she recounts her first day in the SEEK program, when she right away said to her students, “I’m scared too.” Lorde’s desire to push herself and her students into difficult

 Audre Lorde, “Poet as Teacher-Human as Poet-Teacher as Human” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 183.  Audre Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Sister Outsider, (Berkley: Crossing Press, 1984), 94.

 realms did not bear exclusively positive results. The poet Simone Bikel Allmond took two of Lorde’s poetry workshops at Hunter and told us in our interview with her that “Lorde was human with all the wonders of human nature, including flaws.” Allmond remembers posing a challenge to Lorde in the classroom, disagreeing openly with her at times. Lorde’s response was sometimes harsh, though perhaps out of respect for Allmond’s tenacity; Lorde wrote on one of her poems: “you would be a fine poet, if you weren’t so lazy.” Allmond remembers being extremely hurt by this—thinking later that Lorde was asking her to confront issues that Lorde herself was unable to face. As a Black student, Allmond felt she was being pushed harder than her white peers . Once, Lorde wanted to submit Allmond’s poem to a competition and when Allmond said “no,” Lorde submitted it secretly. Allmond was delighted to win the contest, but it was clearly a betrayal of trust. Lorde’s classroom was a place of open wounds, where vulnerability was visible and the learning process entailed acts of mutual care as well as expressions of tension. She writes at the end of one journal entry, “interested in hostility.” While it remains unsaid toward what or whom this hostility is directed, it is of note that she is not saddened by it, afraid of it, concerned about it, or wanting to transform it into a positive feeling. How many of us, with command over a classroom, would be interested in hostility? For Lorde, good conversation was an uncomfortable process, one toward which those involved might feel hostile, and even project such hostility onto her. She does not shy away from it. Instead, her notes show a movement toward this tension. She speaks of this course in the interview with Rich as “confrontation teaching.” Moreover, the desire to prioritize difficult conversation was not only extended to her students, but also to her colleagues. In a memo to the Hunter College English Department, she asked her

 Ibid. 97.

 colleagues to examine their own racism and recounts racist incidents that her students had shared with her. She does not say that her colleagues are perpetuating these kinds of violations, but instead makes it clear that as long as such a list can exist, no one is doing their job properly. She proposes a series of seminars to increase racial consciousness amongst the faculty. In calling her peers to task, Lorde demands a space to discuss the anger over her students’ experiences and her own, asking her colleagues to work toward transformation, just as she asks of her students.

IV. In 1981, Lorde was recruited to serve as resident poet in the Hunter College English Department. This position would mark a significant shift in Lorde’s teaching work, as she would now lead poetry workshops rather than the literature and sociology seminars she had been teaching at John Jay. At Hunter, her role would be that of the poet above all else, similar to the position that she had last undertaken at Tougaloo more than a decade earlier. Sarah Schulman recalls the first day of a class she took with Lorde at Hunter. The course was listed as “U.S. Literature After WWII,” though the moment Lorde walked in, she announced that the course title would be changed to “The Poet as Outsider.” Most of the students were taking the class to fulfill a requirement and had no knowledge of Lorde, despite the fact that, by the early 1980s, she was quite well known. Lorde had undergone one mastectomy and Schulman recalls being struck by the image of her professor’s numerous necklaces hanging in the space where her breast had once been. There would be three required texts: Understanding the New Black Poetry, Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans, and Lesbian Poetry. Schulman stressed to us the importance of what it meant for her to be in a course like this during the 1980s. This was the

 first time she had been in a college classroom with a Black professor, and she suspects that was the case for many of the other students. Lesbianism was not widely discussed in academic settings, so to be assigned a book called Lesbian Poetry, the cover of which displayed the title in huge lettering, was an enormous anomaly. Schulman jokes about Lorde’s full awareness that in assigning a book like that, her students would be displaying the cover to other passengers on the subway as they read it, sending that fertile discomfort of the classroom out into the world. The course materials from Hunter that we have included testify to the kind of transgressive teaching that Schulman describes. On a syllabus for a 1985 course called “The Other Woman: Lesbian Voices in 20th Century American Literature,” Lorde lists texts that document the Black feminist project of circulating contemporary activist periodicals within the everyday and private spaces inhabited by women. In assigning readings such as Elly Bulkin’s “Racism and Writing: Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics” from Sinister Wisdom #13, and essays from the “Working Class Experience” issue of Thirteenth Moon magazine and the newsletter of Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC), Lorde invited her students into the internal politics of the lesbian movement. This course was not structured to introduce students to lesbian art and politics, and it made no effort to situate itself in relation to the white, male canon. She acknowledges the work of lesbian thinkers as already vitally established, regardless of its relation to the mainstream. In signing up for her course, students agreed to inhabit the space that these writers had already cultivated and to sit at the table as active voices in the movement. By insisting on the issues activists engaged with, Lorde remained ever vigilant to the tendnecy of some academic work to misdirect its energies. In a 1978 letter to a group of Black women who were enlisted

 by white academics at Brooklyn College to organize a conference on Black feminism, Lorde urges them not to participate: “Our time is not forever, my sisters. While we are planning the Brooklyn conference, who’s organizing a race/class/sex rap with the black women at Bedford Hills, or in other prisons?”

V. We have reproduced a single chapter draft from Lorde’s unfinished novel, Deotha. Written mostly in St. Croix, where Lorde lived with her partner, Gloria Joseph, in the mid-1980s until the end of her life, the fragments that exist of Lorde’s second novel help us see the ways in which she reflected upon her early teaching life. InDeotha , Lorde provides us with a narrative that her teaching materials can only imply. They show a character who must negotiate the various demands put upon her in all of the roles she must play—mother, teacher, artist, and lover—revealing the connections between these dimensions of her life. Lorde’s manuscript tells the story of a teacher in a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department in New York City as she transitions from a marriage to a white man and into a relationship with a woman in Rhode Island, taking care of her two children and responding to the issues arising in her department. This narrative corresponds very directly to Lorde’s own biography. Here, as in Zami—her only published novel, a “biomythography” of her coming-of-age as a lesbian—we see Lorde remembering formative parts of her earlier life. The chapter we have included, “Bath/School/Pia,” begins with an account of Deotha’s bathing ritual, her respite from the varied pressures of motherhood, activism, and teaching. The scene is long, offering the minute details of her bathing regime, including her

 Cheryl Clarke, “But Some of Us Are Brave and the Transformation of the Academy: Transformation?” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no. 4 (2001), 782.

 favorite body oils and the various fragrances she adds to the water, all of which invokes Lorde’s characteristic concern for the nurturance of one’s body. For her, caring is not self-indulgence but an “act of political warfare.” However, this warfare is not waged without hindrance. As she melts into the comfort of her brief escape, she succumbs to a host of parental worries and concerns surrounding her work founding a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Connors College. She writes about controversy among the faculty regarding who should assume chairmanship of the new department, a position that would likely go to either Deotha or Cumberbatch Smith, the two faculty members who have been at Connors the longest. Deotha feels that Smith is driven by an unhealthy “avarice for power” rather than a genuine commitment to reforming the academic horizons for Black and Puerto Rican students. The narrator believes that the various internecine tensions among Connors’ Black and Puerto Rican faculty and students are carefully watched, if not encouraged, by the white administration, which would like nothing more than to see the failure of the department. A phone call after Deotha’s bath—a young man’s voice growling the words “you better leave our department, lezzie!”— reveals the extent of the cruel drama in which Deotha is embroiled. The dispute at Connors is close to Lorde’s own experience at John Jay, where her lesbian feminist identity made her an outsider in Black and Puerto Rican Studies. Her archival materials show her accounts of departmental conflict, including finding her desk searched and receiving threatening phone calls against her and her children. Under these conditions, the department was an extremely fraught place for Lorde, and she ultimately left the department to teach in English. Lorde also alluded to her trying experiences in her 1974 poem

 Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 131.

 “Blackstudies,” written while she was still at John Jay. There she recounts students waiting outside her door, “searching condemning listening,” and being strangled by “a nightmare of leaders/ at crowded meetings to study our problems,” where she moves “awkward and ladylike/ through four centuries of unused bathtubs.” Deotha’s framing of the long aside about Connors College within the account of the bath, insinuates the near-maddening disruption of Lorde’s internal, emotional well-being caused by the unrest at John Jay. The chapter shows Lorde’s demand for action is not a simple one when contextualized within a stretched life. Deotha is spread thin, perhaps finding it difficult to change the effects of racism in the ways Lorde asks of her students. She writes that Deotha “could see the dangers of a limited vision at the same time as she felt her own reluctance to implement any broader one,” highlighting the ways in which organizing the department involves the reluctance that emerges from interpersonal conflict and exhaustion. The chapter’s attention to her working life as it spills into her home life, ending with her children playing “going to a meeting,” reveals the importance of reading Deotha’s converging identities together. If scholars tend to separate the poet from the teacher from the human, then Lorde writes them back in as one.

VI. The intimacy Lorde shared with her students is also addressed in her private reflections on pedagogy. We have chosen to bookend the teaching materials included here with an unpublished poem and a dream from Lorde’s journal, both of which depict her being confronted with the same question she asked her students: “what am I doing here?” The anxieties about teaching and learning

 Audre Lorde, “Black Studies” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 157, 156.

 expressed in these short works recall incidents from Zami, where Lorde narrates childhood experiences of marginalization at Catholic school and Hunter High, which instilled in her the uneasiness of being an outsider. Her alienation would be re-affirmed at John Jay, where she was the only lesbian in Black and Puerto Rican Studies, and the only Black teacher in the English Department. The poem, “The CLASSROOMS,” echoes what she calls the “loneliness” of this position, where the “we,” like Deotha in her attempt to self- protect, is always “enclosed by the walls between us.” Looking to these documents aids us in viewing Lorde as a multidimensional figure— a “warrior poet” subject to fear and self-doubt—even as she refused to back down from pushing both her students and her colleagues into challenging conversations. “The CLASSROOMS” and Lorde’s dream journal, alongside the syllabi, notes, institutional memoranda, and Deotha draft, represent the artifacts of one person’s multiform, ever-evolving vocation as, at once, Poet-Teacher, Human-Poet and Teacher-Human. This collection is an attempt to represent, in the form of a published finality, a career that unfolded in time and moved over a varied geography. For Lorde, the activity of living as a teacher was something that would not be finished and cannot be arranged into the neat body of a univocal prose narrative. The documents reproduced here constitute the bones and muscle of emotionally-charged classroom interactions. Thus, they are too site-specific and time-bound to justify re-incarnation in published form without somehow invoking the un- recorded, collective and improvised events which they were written to help facilitate. They are works whose lives were in the conversations they supported. What they do not do, now that they are published, is substantiate the experience of a single author. They function as a kind of multitudinous score for the improvised exchange of ideas about, and in urgent response to, the political struggles of their time.

 Though these texts have the appearance of plans and instructions, they ultimately amount to points from which to diverge, more than directions to follow. Taken altogether, they memorialize an activity that defied planning, re-constructing a teaching practice that saw the classroom as a collectively composed, gradually crafted commentary on the now. —Miriam Atkin & Iemanjá Brown

 A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

THE FRAGMENTS AND DRAFTS that we have selected for this chapbook trace the labor of teaching as it stretches across the various realms of one person’s life. Audre Lorde’s reading lists, lesson plans and hastily penned notes on her students in class are mundane and extraordinary evidence of the breadth of a teacher’s work. In her essay, “Poet as Teacher–Human as Poet–Teacher as Human,” Lorde says, “I am a human being. I am a Black woman, a poet, mother, lover, teacher, friend, fat, shy, generous, loyal, crotchety. If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.” The archival materials published here document Lorde’s intention to bring all of those identities into the classroom, and our transcriptions reflect the original documents in that we have faithfully rendered the originals as they appear, including any odd constructions and abbreviated thoughts. In our transcription of a draft chapter from the unpublished novel Deotha, we stayed as close as possible to Lorde’s texts, incorporating handwritten corrections as they appeared. Throughout our work on this project, we have been teaching in the CUNY system, facing joys and deep frustrations that feel both consonant with and distinct from the experiences documented in this chapbook. Lorde’s teaching materials have served as our guide and inspire our actions in and outside of the classroom. We teach from a very different place than Lorde, because we are white and because we work in a different—though continuous—set of socio-historical conditions. Even so, the outlook for widely-accessible, well-funded, autonomous educational spaces seems as far away now as in Lorde’s time, and her words retain their urgent relevance. Lorde’s everyday

 Audre Lorde, “Poet as Teacher-Human as Poet-Teacher as Human” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 183.

 struggles against the conditions of the institution are evident here, as well as in her widely known poetry and essays. Lorde urges her students to define themselves in ways that will be of use in the world. She encourages them to identify with their own multiple selves, and in doing so, establish an activist practice deeply seated in self-knowledge. These archival materials allow us as editors, teachers, readers and students to imagine ourselves in Lorde’s classroom, and undergo our own political and intellectual transformations.

 THE CLASSROOMS

I teach myself in outline haunting my own childhood in classrooms of dirty children that smelled of snot and tears and wet feet in winter catching spitballs and chalk and a storm of childhood diseases while a lifeless bag of asafoetida hung around my neck kept to keep me free from all contagion and while I stank with safety and loneliness.

We are Enclosed by the walls between us by the chemistry of the dead spaces we share smelling naïve and plastic safe and unspeakable and true they will not speak.

 SYLLABI, TEACHING JOURNALS, NOTES, AND COURSE PROPOSALS FROM JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

[Undated] HIST/LIT. 210 RACE AND THE URBAN SITUATION MS. AUDRE LORDE OR “CIVILIZATION OR DEATH TO ALL AMERICAN SAVAGES” (Officer’s toast,1779 )

DISCUSSION TOPICS & ASSIGNED READINGS

INTRODUCTION – What is a race?

I. Defining racism not ethnocentrism; bias; prejudice; bigotry; discrimination are there ‘unconscious’ racism; degrees of racism READING: Suggested- Allport-The Nature of Prejudice

II. Racism in America A. western values for ‘Black’ slavery & racism in other societies coloured; negro; & Black READINGS: Required; Schwartz & Disch pages 1-50; Boggs ‘Uprooting Racism’ Suggested: Gosset, Thomas- Race, The History Of An Idea

B. What is a racist society? Institutionalized racism: The subjective racism – personal function the objective racism – utility and profit Metaracism READING: Required; Kovel- pages 211-230; also Chapter II READING: Suggested; Boggs- ‘Uprooting Racism’, p 146

III. Mechanics Of Oppression A. Dehumanization – the images and its acceptance

 Stereotyping Instruction of history pseudo-scientific rationales READINGS: Required; Schwartz & Disch pages 384-442 Suggested: Carlson, Lewis- In Their Place pp 97-115 B. Division – class conflict & the american dream other myths that divide; matriarchy; who’s blacker’n who; Blackness defined as deprivation READINGS: Required; Schwartz & Disch pages 442 - 452; 263 - 270 Suggested: Gosset, 144-197; 409-430; Boggs – “Black Capitalism”- pp 135

IV. Effects of Racism on White Americans the true dehumanization fear & guilt: projection & acting out the acceptance of one’s own oppression READINGS: Required; Schwartz pages 155-162; 189 - 207; 251-258 Suggested; Kovel – chapter 4; & Howe, Louise The White Majority V. Effects of racism on Black Americans A. The internalized stereotype self-expectations & ‘who d’ya think you are? ‘identification with white’ self definition & self-acceptance

B. Disunity who am I so who are you horizontal anger your foot on my neck or my foot on your neck : other choices

C. Fear the desire to lull & pacify the oppressor adopting dysfunctional values

 D. The here and now can we separate ideology & values from action?

READINGS: Suggested: Staples, Robert. The Black Family Boggs, James Kennedy, Flo. Racism and Sexism in Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful Cade, Toni. The Black Woman: An Anthology Baldwin, James. Notes Of A Native Son FREEDOMWAYS, Fall, 1971. “Jensenism, the New Racism”

OTHER ASSIGNMENTS READ: Bennett, Lerone. Before the Mayflower. READ: Question on the Midterm Exam, Oct. 30

Outside project report: to be assigned following Midterm

Book Reports – three. To be discussed in class. one page. Weekly Journal – one page written weekly on some point or points made in class discussions. s [1971]

HISTORY/LITERATURE 210 -- DISCUSSION TOPICS and READINGS all page references are for Schwartz & Disch, White Racism . Techniques of Oppression -pp. 155-162; 385-452 I. Psychological A. Dehumanization Stereotyping Destruction of history Invisibility Pseudo---Scientific rationales B. Division

 Class conflict and the american dream Identification with the dominant group

II. Material A. Political pp. 508-518 B. Economic pp.324-333 C. Social pp.121-140 Education pp.302-315 Religion pp.270-285 D. Physical Ghetto-making pp.352-362 Violence pp.228-251; 373-381

RECOMMENDED READINGS _ ADDITIONAL; Kovel, Joel. White Racism: A Psychohistory Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans Gossett, Thomas. Race: The History of An Idea THE BLACK SCHOLAR--A Journal of Black Studies and Research 3/70-Black Psychology Issue: 6/70-Black Culture Issue

Effects of Racism I. Dominant Group pp.167-182; 189-217 A. Guilt; rationalization B. Fear; projection and acting-out C. Acceptance of their own oppression D. Need for a victim

II. Subordinate Group pp.182-189 A. Internalization of stereotypes B. Identification with dominant group C. Disunity D. Desire to lull and pacify oppressor E. Anger

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READINGS -Jones, Leroi. Home. -Major, Clarence. New Black Poetry.

 Grier & Cobbs. Black Rage. Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul On Ice; also, Post Prison Writings. Autobiography of Malcolm X Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans

Where WE Are Introduction

I. Defining racism A. Ethnocentrism, Bias, Prejudice, Bigotry, Discrimination B. ‘Unconscious’ Racism C. Relationship between beliefs, attitudes, and actions

II. Racism in America Schwartz- p. 1-50 A. ‘Black’ in western Culture Gossett-p.3-17 B. Coloured to Negro to Black C. Racism in other societies D. What is a racist society Kovel- chapter 2 E. Institutionalized racism Boggs- objective & subjective racists utility factor: Indians, slavery, etc.

III. Mechanics of Oppression A. Dehumanization Schwartz-p. 385-452 Stereotyping: the invisible man Destruction of history Pseudo-scientific rationales - Gossett-p.144-197; 409-430 B. Violence: physical and otherwise - Sch.-p.228-251; 182-189;302-314 C. Division: class conflict & the american dream- Boggs-‘Uprooting…’ D. ‘ Metaracism’ - Kovel-p.211-230 Kerner Report-Introduction & Conclusions

IV. Effects of Racism - White Americans A. The true dehumanization Schwartz-p. 155-162

 B. Fear: projection & acting out & guilt C. Acceptance of own oppression Schwartz p.251-258 Kovel- chapter 4

V. Effects of Racism – Black Americans “BLACK GIRL” A. Internalization of Stereotypes a play at Theatre self expectations De Lys, NYC. by 11/17 ‘identification with whiteness’ see also ‘SUGGESTED who am I; self acceptance READINGS’ B. Disunity: the suspect self who are you horizontal anger C. Fear desire to lull & pacify oppressor dysfunctional values ------

‘There must be something the matter with him because he would not be acting as he does unless there was therefore he is acting as he is because there is something the matter with him…’ from Knots, by R.D. Laing

SUGGESTED READINGS and OUTSIDE ASSIGNMENTS

ASSIGNMENTS Films: “dates to be announced in class “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed” “The Warsaw Ghetto”

“ [illegible] a play. Theatre De Lys – 121 Christopher St., NYC WA 4-8782

 The above are required assignments

SUGGESTED READINGS – BY DISCUSSION TOPICS I. Defining Racism BLACK SCHOLAR Magazine – 3/70; 6/70 ( in JJ Library ) Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience

II. Racism in America Van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism -, Hardcover Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Essays Stein, Gertrude. “Melanctha” in Three Lives Kitano, Harry. American Racism

III. Mechanics of Oppression Wright, Richard. Native Son. Fict. Jones, LeRoi. Home: Essays FREEDOMWAYS, Fall, 1971. “Jensenism; the New Racism” Perio. Article

IV. Effects of Racism – White Americans Television program: “All In The Family” King, Larry. Confessions Of A White Racist. Hardcover

V. Effects of Racism – Black Americans The BLACK SCHOLAR: THE CARRIBEAN REVIEW: FREEDOMWAYS. Periodicals Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family In The United States, Rev.ed. Cade, Toni. The Black Woman, An Anthology Staples, R. The Black Family The Autobiography of Malcolm X Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. Fiction Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets Baldwin, James. Notes Of A Native Son. Essays AMISTAD I and AMISTAD II; anthologies of contemp. writings

 Hare, Nathan. The Black Anglo-Saxons Ladner, Joyce. Tomorrow’s Tomorrow BLACK SCHOLAR, 9/71; ‘The Black Man’ issue Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americanss

TEACHING JOURNALS, NOTES, AND COURSE PROPOSALS

[Undated] Racist Society 1. where racism is a part of structure serves necessary utility function for the continuation until becomes institution. In such, subj. racist is norm, his racism is encouraged and used to implement systematic oppression, of subordinate group for profit.

Mechanics of Oppression The 1st primary technique is dehumanization. What is? the easiest way to justify oppression is to make object just that—object. Not humans in ships—things, slaves, Negroes. The racist must create an image in his mind something deserving oppression-nonhuman Constitution—Jefferson, Washington 3/5 of a man. Time—twisted faces of white mothers. Humans children repeat In process, what else necessary? Must force subordinate group to fit. I said if each of us is to survive, acute self-awareness—definition—who am I? 2. I would like us to look at some of the roots of American racism. We can begin with the Western connotations of “Black” Webster’s—“a word of difficult history” absence of light, dirty, fowl, malignant, pertaining to death, wicked, indicating disgrace based on the JC ethic equaling darkness with evil. This is not so in all societies certainly—in the orient white is the color death, of evil, black is of life, and luck.

 Prejudice against difference is not an American invention, nor is racism although no country in history has raised it to the degree of America, nor profited so highly. Chinese emperor--*Slavery also existed in the ancient world, but as a different institution. Condition of loss, code of Hammurabi—Egypt—Sumerian 5,000. How do we account for these differences within societies? To understand, we must look at what we mean by a racist society. What is a racist society? Is it a society that includes racists, not China, not Egypt. One where racism is institutionalized this –becomes so much an integral part of the fabric of that society that its very structures political, economic, social, reflect and depend. Not where racists exist, but where racism is utilized and fed upon. So that, racists in Europe, but the emblem of Hudson Company— “Come over and help” noble savage. By 1675, King Philip’s Wars more and more land needed—easier to kill than to civilize, and the noble savage became real monster, to be slaughtered. Instit. racism against indian could justify wiping them off land. Same development of slavery. First blacks here were not slaves—but indentured servants. But with the growth of tobacco as a cash crop, free labor pool was needed. Not Indians. Blacks. 1629 rights (?)—Christian 1655 English 1660 White Racism necessary to justifying enslavement, where Black became a thing deserving only slavedom.

[Year Unspecified]

9/30 …What are some of the stereotypes usually associated with Negro Stereo Filthy homes Cannot excel in school processed heads Illegitimacy

 Doles Domestics Always grinning Easy going Small God Cheats Liars Inferiority Something for nothing Sensitive about being called a boy Loud music Mugging Baptist Superstitious Kinky hair Poor Look alike Crowded apt. Large families Corners Love chicken

Stereo’s listed some hostile questioning why I don’t know. No one stayed after. 10/2 What we discussed just visible part of iceberg

We don’t think such – don’t have to caught like a subacute infection

guilt imperfect form of knowledge only guilty of accepting them not dealing with their presence we make sure we think right but what we feel is what is

 projected and open most tellingly

the destructive weight of these s. on black children is beginning to dawn on you. How destructive to white people how closed and denied

10/4 Film on Thursday 9 classes so far Time for feedback

Why do you think I am here

How do you feel about class – are you satisfied – where do you think we are going

Interested in hostility

10/18 Why bored? Some of us are afraid Film

10/27 1. we have spoken of CD who took part in Campus Dialogue attempt now over all that is required for evil to triumph is that just men remain silent

so many of you eschew violence why – reminder of your failure alternative to closing doors

if you don’t learn to open mouths you will be trampled and have no say in what

1/5 welcome

 Black Suicide – Hendrix

How many saw exhibit

We have spent discussing racism

In what way do you see yourself altering the effects of the course of

What are 1. the effects of racism in yourself 2. what are you doing or prepared to do to alter these 2. attitudes in yourself

In your world

1/6 How do you see the effects of racism in yourself

How can you alter these effects in yourself - in the world around you

9/24 What do you see as me – strong etc. “Why are we teachers” afraid of what they see of each other Subject matter commitment not people.

Off the topic - anxieties boredom - spoken slightly then back to same. Why not dealt with. dissatisfied after class

9/30 R. - acute A. - disappointed F. - whats the topic

 At this point in her journals, Lorde begins recording various classroom interactions between her students. We have kept their names anonymous.

 lots of abstract J. - what she thinks of J. L. - I don’t see the point

A. - I’m thinking of camping T. - moral & ethical question - I stole a blanket right or wrong Christianity & Judaism the same J. - how can you say that

10/1 A. absent program L. talked J. [illegible] hour – feeling not intellect PR not black struggle J. after class - A. is bigot

10/6 Confrontation C. & J.

Alliance between J. & J.

A. by J. One 10/9 J. feels personally affronted by A.’s /another’s attitude

A. has made a statement that has colored J.’s attitude toward him. She has confronted him with it. Whats going here?

There’s no difference between Black & White – People are people – Someone takes each side

10/9 F. play the woman

 Couldn’t - I said because they equate different and inferior

Reps

10/23 F. says I not your mother Suppose she was what would you say to her

J. too - lets role play. you help A. I’ll help F. Help - I mean feed lines

Situation - Ma - I think your a [illegible] prejudiced attitude toward hippies.

[Undated] In your daily living Give 3 examples of actual ways in which you yourself can function to positively counteract racism Be Specific

[Undated] Midterm for “Race and the Urban Situation”

Power steps back only in the face of more power.

Do you find this an accurate statement in terms of history of black people in America? Discuss four historical occurrences from Before the Mayflower as examples illustrating your answer.

 [Undated] 1. who am I 2. experience 5 years ago 3. experience – recent 4. similes– sneeze – slap 5. experience – fear 6. “ - anger 7. “ - anger 8. disc. Of someone disliked 9. disc. Of someone liked 10. “ 11. “

[1972] 3/72 - Racism

Project. - we talk a lot

I wanted some idea of how you see yourself functioning

due 5/3 – 5 page

choose a situation + enter it or evaluate one you already are in & put into practice one of the ways you counteract racism ie. ongoing contact write up in detail [illegible] why did you choose this situation or how are you connected with it

who if any are the others involved a record of your actions over a 2 week period & why

what are the observed results do they differ from your expectations do you intend to continue or alter tactics

 COURSE PROPOSAL

Tentative Title

BS/LIT. 2XX – Afro American Poetry And The Black Aesthetic Course Description What is the Black Aesthetic in relation to poetry? Does Afro-American Poetry begin with Phillis Wheatley or Leroi Jones? OR: Are Afro-American Poetry and Black Poetry the same? By examining the poetry, students will explore traditional and contemporary themes within the work of a number of Black Poets, and will attempt to identify some of the vital forces at work within Black Poetry today, relevance to the contemporary scene. In addition to readings in all periods of Afro-American Poetry, students will be expected to attend outside readings of contemporary Black Poets.

Prerequisites Eng. 101; Eng.102; or instructor’s permission

Rationale Black Poetry is one of the most dynamic elements within American Literature today. In addition to becoming acquainted with who the Black Poets are and the nature of their work, it is necessary for us to develop real critical standards by which to evaluate this poetry. To do this, we must understand the historical and aesthetic significance of Black Poetry, as well examine those roots within the Afro-American experience out of which this poetry springs.

Relation to Existing Courses There is no course offered at the College which deals with this area of American literature, nor this aspect of the Literature of the Black Experience.

 [Undated] We consider Bl literature thematically—

Black Aesthetic as evolving set of standards — values by which we measure Black art. No system of values has worth unless it aims to make us better than we are. What do I mean by better? By better I mean for each of us—more who we are. That we develop then from Igyougus Now what does this mean for Black Americans? We have been driven from ourselves, whitened, made ashamed of what we now call black, & therefore of ourselves. Much of our early literature was directed not to black people or for black people but to white people about non-blackness.

 SYLLABI, OUTLINES, AND TEACHING NOTES FROM HUNTER COLLEGE

Audre Lorde Hunter College ENG. 398.58-51 September, 1985

THE OTHER WOMAN: Lesbian Voices in 20th Century Amer. Literature

BOOKLIST ( all books available at WOMAN BOOKS, 92nd St. & Amsterdam Avenue, NYC. )

Required Texts

Cruikshank, Margaret. LESBIAN STUDIES, PRESENT AND FUTURE. Feminist Pr. Brant, Beth. MOHAWK TRAIL Firebrand Books. A Gathering of Spirit. Sinister Wisd. Bulkin, Elly. LESBIAN POETRY Bulkin, Elly. LESBIAN FICTION Klepfisz, Irena. KEEPER OF ACCOUNTS MORAGA, Cherrie. LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS Lorde, Audre. ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME Parker, Pat. JONESTOWN AND OTHER MADNESS Rich, Adrienne. SOURCES Tsui, Kitty. THE WORDS OF A WOMAN WHO BREATHES FIRE Smith, Barbara. HOMEGIRLS, A BLACK FEMINIST ANTHOLOGY TOWARD A BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM (pamphlet) Grahn, Judy. A WOMAN IS TALKING TO DEATH Cliff, Michelle. From the Land of Look Behind MacDonald, Barbara – Look Me In the Eye

 Recommended Texts

Gayle, THE BLACK AESTHETIC Cruikshank, Margaret. THE LESBIAN PATH Hull, Gloria. GIVE US EACH DAY Cliff, Michelle. CLAIMING AN IDENTITY THEY TAUGHT ME TO DESPISE Allen, Paula Gunn. THE WOMAN WHO OWNED THE SHADOWS SHADOW COUNTRY RICH, Adrienne. ON LIES, SECRETS, AND SILENCE Grahn, Judy. THE WORK OF A COMMON WOMAN THE HIGHEST APPLE ANOTHER MOTHER TONGUE Hull, Scott, & Smith BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE: Black Women’s Studies Lorde, Audre. SISTER OUTSIDER Smith, Pratt, Bulkin. YOURS IN STRUGGLE: Racism & Antisemitism in the Women’s Movement Thirteenth Moon, Vol VIII- The Working Class Experience Macdonald, Barbara. LOOK ME IN THE EYE Sinclair, Jo. The Changelings Newsletter of ALOEC And when they turned the bones on - a burst of light

I. Contexts of Contemporary Lesbian Feminist Writing

A. Questions to be considered What defines lesbian literature what does it have in common with other literatures of the outsider what differentiates lesbian literature how do lesbian differences of identity affect how we create and define lesbian literatures

REQUIRED READINGS Gayle, Addison. THE BLACK AESTHETIC. Introduction; ppi-19

 Harris, Bertha. “What We Mean To Say: Notes Toward Defining The Nature of Lesbian Literature” in Heresies, Fall, 1977. Bulkin, Elly. LESBIAN FICTION. Introduction (A Look At Lesbian Short Fiction) “Kissing Against The Light; A Look At Lesbian Poetry,” in Cruikshank, M. LESBIAN STUDIES, pp32-35 Smith, Barbara. TOWARD A BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM ( pam. ) also in Hull, Scott,& Smith BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE, pp 157-176

RECOMMENDED READINGS Cook, Blanche Wiesen “Women Alone Stir My Imagination”, Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,” in Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1979, Vol 4 no 4. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “ The Female World of Love and Ritual,”In Signs, Vol i, no i. II. Foremothers

REQUIRED READINGS

Cook, Blanche W. “Women Alone Stir My Imagination,” Signs, v 4, #4 Hull, Gloria. “Under the Days, The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke,” in Smith, Barbara HOMEGIRLS, A Black Feminist Anthology. pp 73-83 “Research Alice Dunbar-Nelson, A Personal & Literary Perspective,” in Hull, Scott & Smith, BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE, pp189-196 Smith, Barbara “ Theft “ in LESBIAN POETRY Grimke, Angelina Weld. “ A Mona Lisa,” & “At April,” in Stetson, Erlene. BLACK SISTER, Poetry Black American Women. pp 60-61

 Shockley, Ann. “ A Case of Telemania,” in Bulkin, LESBIAN FICTION pp138 Rule, Jane. “ In the Attic of the House”, Bulkin, ˝ ˝ p23

RECOMMENDED READINGS Hull, Gloria UNDER THE DAYS. NY, Norton, 1984 Shockley, Ann. THE BLACK AND WHITE OF IT (short stories) LOVING HER (novel) Brown, Rita Mae, RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE (novel) Hall, Rad., WELL OF LONELINESS (novel) Morgan, Claire. THE PRICE OF SALT (novel) SEE ALSO- Bibliography, Cruikshank, LESBIAN STUDIES

III. Issues of Difference (Racism. Anti-Semitism, Ageism, Class)

A. LESBIANS OF COLOR

REQUIRED READINGS

Bulkin, E. “Racism and Writing; Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics,” in Sinister Wisdom #13 Gomez, Jewelle “ A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women” in HOMEGIRLS, pp110-124 Shockley, Ann. “ The Black Lesbian in American Literature ; An Overview”, in HOMEGIRLS, pp83-94 Cliff, Michelle. “ Obsolete Geography” in Land of Look Behind Blackwomon, Julie. “ Revolutionary Blues” in LESBIAN POETRY p.132

Moraga, Cherrie. LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS— La Guera

LORDE, Audre ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME

Parker, Pat. JONESTOWN AND OTHER MADNESS

 Tsui, Kitty. THE WORDS OF A WOMAN WHO BREATHES FIRE

RECOMMENDED READINGS Allen, Paula Gunn. THE WOMAN WHO OWNED Allen, Paula Gunn. THE SHADOWS (novel) Allen, Paula Gunn. SHADOW COUNTRY (poetry) Brant, Beth, editor. A GATHERING OF SPIRIT (anthology) Harjo, Joy. SHE HAD SOME HORSES (poetry) Moraga, Cherrie, ed. THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK In LESBIAN FICTION Carrillo, Jo, “ Maria Littlebear” Noda, Barbara. “ Thanksgiving Day” Blackwomon, Julie. “ Kippy” —do Flying Clouds “ Another Place to Begin” Rodriquez, Aleida “ Sequences” Jamal, Sauda “ A Mother That Loves You” Tsui, Kitty “ Poa Poa Is Living Breathing Light”—do Newsletter of ASIAN LESBIANS OF THE EAST COAST Cliff, Michelle. ABENG (novel)

B. JEWISH LESBIANS REQUIRED READINGSv Beck, Evelyn. “Teaching about Jewish Lesbians in Literature,” in Cruikshank, LESBIAN STUDIES Kaye, Melanie. “Notes of an Immigrant Daughter; Atlanta” in Beck, Evelyn, ed. NICE JEWISH GIRLS, An Anthology. pp109 Klepfisz, Irena. KEEPER OF ACCOUNTS –read Basert “Journal of Rachel Robotnik” in LESBIAN FICTION Rich, Adrienne. SOURCES

RECOMMENDED READINGS Bulkin, Pratt, & Smith. YOURS IN STRUGGLE: Racism & Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement

 C. WORKING CLASS LESBIANS REQUIRED READINGS Work Sonnets – Klepfisz—with notes & a monologue Allison, Dorothy, “I’m Working on My Charm” in LESBIAN FICTION Allison, Dorothy, “A River of Names” in LESBIAN FICTION “My Career As A Thief” in Conditions Mag. # 9

RECOMMENDED READINGS Thirteenth Moon Magazine, Col, Vii—Working Class Experience?

D. OLDER LESBIANS

REQUIRED READING

ON BEING OLD AND AGE. Sinister Wisdom issue #10

RECOMMENDED READING Arnold, June. SISTER GIN Macdonald, Barbara. LOOK ME IN THE EYE

[Undated] Proposal for Faculty Seminar at Hunter on Race

This is around the N.B. (North Building) a saying I have to live with— but we are all on the side of truth. It is not enough to be on the side of truth. Unless we use ourselves in the service of that truth, make those things we believe real within our living, then they are meaningless in our lives. I am a Black Woman of intelligence and sensitivity—a poet doing my work, and today a piece of that work is to share with each one of you some of the pain and wastefulness of racism here at Hunter. I have been named TH Professor, an honor of which I am proud. It is an ironic honor, for I am one of those women that TH considered uneducable. He believed only those fair of skin could learn well, and he

 Distinguished Thomas Hunter Chair.

 writes of one Black woman who took 8 years to complete college—his own words—he says she has “The Negro face in all its barbaric deformity, flat nose, thick lips, retreating chin.” I know whatTH thought about me. Resisting such hatred in a classroom takes an enormous amount of energy. I attended Hunter High School across the street in the 1940’s, and I was taught by white women who had studied under TH. I learned a lot from some of those women, but their presumption of my inferiority left vivid scars across my young womanhood. It took me 10 years to complete Hunter College. Not because of my Black face, but because I worked at night to support myself. Psychology class my lab partner was white and she also worked full time. We were late with a lab report once and told our professor about the difficulty each of us was having with schedules. She told us to come see her and she thought she could help us about work. This professor was head of the department, and there were student lab asst. jobs available so we were quite hopeful. When we saw her, she made Marcia a lab asst, and offered me a job in her house as a live-in maid. But of course that is history, and the essence of progress is change. Today, the student body at Hunter is now of 54% people of color and [left blank] female. But some things have not changed. There are racial attitudes still flourishing in some of our classrooms that rival any of my experiences.

Racism at Hunter Today 1. is a professor saying to a student, in public, “What are you doing here? You know you people can’t write.” 2. is a professor writing a proposal for a Women’s Studies Program at the Univ. of Ciskei without even knowing that the Ciskei is a Bantustan created by South Africa, one giant death-camp where women sit for days by the side of the road, with dying children in their arms, waiting for the weekly water truck from Pretoria. 3. is a pre-med student from the Caribbean being told that medical school requires sustained concentration, so perhaps she should become a lab technician instead. 4. is taking a course on the American Revolution and never learning that the 1st person to die in the Boston Massacre was a black man, Crispus

 Attucks. Without learning that 2 of the great heroes of that war and of Bunker Hill were Black members of the Green Mountain Boys name[d] Peter Salem & Salem Poor. These facts do not only belong in a course on Black History—they belong in a course on the American Revolution— part of the history of America. 5. is a science professor explaining to a whole class of predominantly Black and Latino students—how they are of inferior intelligence compared to students at Harvard and therefore he is not going to be bothered to teach them certain fundamentals of the subject, since it would be a waste of his time.

These are only a few random examples of racism at Hunter today in and out of the classroom. It is not enough to believe we are on the side of truth. Racism at Hunter will change when we begin to recognize that race, and distortions around race, are realities in American consciousness and when we as educators, dare to examine the ways in which these distortions affect our teaching, and imprint themselves upon our students. It is not enough to believe we are on the side of right. I propose a series of faculty seminars on racial awareness and a race- conscious curriculum that will begin to explore some of these issues, and I urge the Faculty Delegate Assembly to support such a proposal and to examine some of these questions before they detonate in our faces.

Dream Journal (1975)

11/14/75

Dream- a classroom- am I the teacher or a student? I have not attended enough – either lost or late. Exam approaching- how can it be a class – how can I study or teach – I haven’t attended enough. Doom must come but will it? There aren’t many people in the class when I go – but they don’t seem disturbed by the irregularity. Sometimes the room is empty + I think the class is meeting somewhere else.

 EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA: “BATH/SCHOOL/PIA”

DEOTHA SHUT THE DOOR firmly behind the persistently righteous religious peddlers, and slammed the deadbolt (with determination). Between the Jehovah Witnesses with their neatly pressed smiles that matched the bright copies of WATCHTOWER and AWAKE, and the insistent ringing of the telephone (…“this is Macy’s calling, your March payment…”), Deotha thought she would never get into the deliciously ample tub of hot water she had started to run almost an hour before. She paused at the refrigerator for a quick swig of apple juice, making a mental note that the bottle of milk which was the only other occupant of the top shelf was only a quarter full. If she and the kids left tonight it would make do until Monday’s delivery. She hated the store-bought containers anyway. Unbuttoning the African caftan she wore for a robe, she shrugged it off onto the floor, moved down the narrow hallway to the windowless bathroom. Blue sky glistened hot and restless through the window of her bedroom across the hall as she took a container down from the shelf over the toilet, and swirled Calgon Bath Beads into the hot water pounding into the tub. She renewed the drawn bath, making the bubbles froth up again. Oh yes, she mused to herself, and don’t I remember this all once many times before, back, back she was drawn to when the kidney- shaped blue enamel tub with its slightly raised curved back was pressing against her well-padded little-girl’s ribs, and her mother’s quick hard hands soft for a minute in the warm water. Then back to the capacious white-enamel-over-iron bathtub on the edge of Harlem, its deep bottom raised upon the compact clawed feet between which a terrible darkness lurked, and within that darkness cockroaches big as horses, and goblins, and tarantulas and trolls. Water ran out

 of that tub through an indifferent noisy drain, and at the bottom shell-like chips waited threatening as the cunning water bugs those chips sometimes hid. Back to the enormous old sunlit tub with its fluted curving edges in the sunny bathroom of Mount Vernon before she was married, the prize possession of her first apartment. When in doubt, bathe. There was nothing a good hot bath couldn’t put into a better perspective, and Dee laughed to herself as she put the Calgon back. That’s just what her mother always used to say about a hot cup of tea! Naked in the harsh light from over the washbasin, Dee uncorked a small bottle of Sandalwood essence, and added 12 fragrant drops to the water. Directions on the side of the frosted little bottle said 7, but Dee was never one to skimp in her bath. Slipped a stick of sandalwood incense out of the india-paper packet, noting again that her supply was getting dangerously low. Holding her clumsy and beloved old Zippo lighter to the tip of the brown wand until it ignited, Dee blew out the flame and breathed in the acrid plume of nutty scent. Stuck the slender wand between two books in the tiny bookcase beside the toilet, checking to see that the ash fell into the bowl. Deotha chooses her soap. Her strong stubby fingers hesitate over then pass the slivers of clear Apricot and Avocado that she wheedles as samples out of the health-food store druggist every time she buys the children’s vitamins. Settles on the Irish Moss, gift from Laura on Bastille Day or some equally esoteric holiday, all good excuses for the giving of love-gifts. She twirls the dial and selects a station on the pocket radio propped up on the shelf between her Old Spice Aftershave Lotion and the Mitchum’s Deodorant Stick. It’s Friday, almost spring, and just this once she passes over WINS, its staccato battering ram of bleached and insistent news -- give us 22 minutes and we will give you the world -- settling instead at the end of the AM dial, lured into

 the Black richness of Aretha’s ‘Amazing Grace’. Beside all the clutter on the toilet-top shelf lies the wristwatch stripped off as she entered the bathroom. She has chosen. Blows up her yellow bath pillow just enough to cushion her head against the unforgiving rim. The half- filled sack of air yields to her fingers as she attaches the rectangle by little suction cups to the back of the bathtub just above the steamy fragrant water. Glides into the hot scented tub. Goose pimples spring like fire to her thighs, her shoulders. A few bubbles burst whispering to her shudder, then the welcome heat rising slowly over her back like an electric rope. She felt herself a velvet spring unwinding, a contradiction in terms Dee murmured sinking deeper into the water. A bluet for your belt-page, Dee-Dee darlin’ her head drifting sliding into the open float of caressing fragrant water so like the trailing fingers of a lover. Lifting tension out of back muscles tight in anticipation of defense or attack. Lifting her tough under-exercised but over-driven young Black woman’s body into the lees of a short strong sleep, as if the very cells demanded respite, their own time of quiet. The moon was rising south through the living room windows as Dee unfolded herself from the paint-stripping of an old oak bureau drawer found in a trash heap on lower Riverside Drive. Her nose twitched and her fingertips stung from the messy task she was hurrying to finish. Discarded section of the Sunday Times layered the round wooden dining table (once salvaged from an alley on the Lower East Side), and the tiny dining alcove reeked with the acrid fumes of varnish-remover. An old player piano was wedged into a space between the living room and the dining area, its sturdy back forming a low half-wall to the dinette. On its mahogany top perched a footed railroad clock whose chimes accompanied every activity conducted by anyone anywhere in the apartment so long as that activity extended over

 half an hour, and except on those Sundays when Dee had forgotten to fetch down the brass key from the jar on the top shelf where it lived safe from children’s skate key-seeking fingers, and lovingly wind the two mechanisms that controlled the clockworks and the chimes. Then the Sunday silence would remind Deotha if Adrian didn’t, her 8 year old voice high with reproach, “Hey mom, the clock’s stopped!” When company came the face framed in ornately carved walnut was turned outward toward the living room, brightly chronicling the leisurely visit. But more usually it faced the dinette, recording the jerky brass seconds that went into every minute wasted or savored or begrudged but never recovered, never sustained, never enough. Deotha straightened, and out of habit, her eyes brushed past the brassy clock-face, a sudden shiver rolling deeply throughout her body. An abrupt draining off of every other tension into one single focused bone crunching terror-who was supposed to pick up the kids today? Maggie? Selena? Herself? Fire fine shards of ice radiating out from her spine up along the edges of her scalp clear through to the middle of her brain. Realization, no escape. She had forgotten. Forgotten. Forgotten. No one to pick up the children after school at the bus stop. 7:30 PM already dark outside and the moon just rising. Adrian and Ronald, their plaid book bags and Flintstones lunchboxes still standing on the bustling street-corner. My God! Did anybody see a little brown girl and her baby brother standing on the corner of 135th Street and Amsterdam Avenue worried and alone as the sun was going down? Did someone take them in but nobody’s called they know their phone-number who where when how come who shall I call first control control control seeping out of her like stale urine cool it goddamn it think order order order and Deotha Chambers palmed the cold sweat off her suddenly livid freckles fighting for some rational use for the burst of energy detonating inside order time order time

 her stomach knotting everything suddenly grey in her eyes and her ears beginning to ring. The battle between panic and useful action threatened to engulf her as she reached desperately for the control mechanisms she had paid so much so often to preserve for just such a dreaded eventuality. A bright shimmer of sunlight hit the aluminum casing of the bedroom window and shot across the narrow hall, piercing through the nightmare to force Dee’s eyes apart, the ultimate nightmare become reality becoming nightmare again then slowly retreating. One slow minute during which the steadying of her own heart occupied all energy not already sapped by her desperate reaching for control, and within the shifting world of that discrete minute, the nightmare clung to her pores, only slowly yielding its panic to the sunlight’s release. Deotha stirred, shook herself in the water, and scrambled upright, then stepped dripping out of the now cool tub. She wrapped an outsized and once luxurious orange bath towel around herself and shoved her well-shaped feet into a pair of old plastic beach thongs. She dried herself quickly, paying particular attention to the tender channels between her toes. “I’m glad I don’t have elegant feet,” Dee thought, pulling the cork out with a hollow pop. “I wonder if Black women’s corns are a socio-economic fact or the difference between pudgy and bony toes. Maybe both…” She listened for a few seconds automatically until she was sure of the slurp slurp that meant the drain stop had released itself and the scented bathwater was running out down the pipes and out to sea. Dee plucked up her nurse’s watch and slid it onto her damp wrist. Twenty of, but she was always five minutes fast. With any luck she would get out of the house only a very few minutes behind and those she could make up driving across town if the traffic wasn’t too heavy.

 No time for a real oiling. Dee loved the slip of sweet oil between her palms and the planes of her body, but now there was no time. One quick swipe down her thighs across both knees and around her elbows and heels, hastily. She ran her hands once through her crisp short hair, wiping off the remaining oil and without a break in her movement crossed the hall into her bedroom as she pulled on her jeans, then slid into her light blue sweatshirt, with CCNY emblazoned across the chest. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to do about the meeting tonight. Dee patted her hair back into place, grabbed her checkbook and comb from the bureau, and moved rapidly through the hall back to the front of the apartment. The intensity of foment over the embattled birthing of a Black and Puerto Rican Department at Connors College percolated through her, bubbling over into her consciousness. A strategy meeting had been called by the junior Black faculty, all three of them. They felt their powerlessness keenly, alternating between bravery and pathos. The meeting tonight was to draft a position paper on the question of split chairmanship, for even before the already beset department had become a reality, personality clashes between Cumberbatch and Isabella were escalating the always volatile political differences between Blacks and Latins on campus into confrontations that were painful, time-costly, and self-destructive. For these confrontations, bitterly emotional and fueled by painful histories, nonetheless occurred under the scrutiny of an administration that pretended not to interfere, but which would have breathed a collective sigh of righteous relief at the failure of this grudgingly allowed experiment called a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department. Connors College was committed on paper to its cosmetic existence, a victory won by two years of students striking for open admission. But there were many forces

 watching gleefully from the sidelines anticipating its still-birth, or early self-destruction. The four other members of the proposed department, ethnically and sexually mixed, were trying to have some input into the growing acrimony between Cumberbatch and Isabella before the acrimony encouraged polarities between Black and Puerto Rican students. Nursing the distrust between Black and Puerto Rican students on campus was the most convenient tool for encouraging chaos. Complicated by the fact that Cumberbatch Smith, Black sociologist and encyclopedia salesman from New Jersey slated by the administration to head the new department, was a serious mistake, in Dee’s opinion. She has seen the look in his eyes, lightning quick hidden, but not fast enough. The avarice of power. Complicated by the fact that most of the Black students at Connors, bruised and suspicious of the administration’s unspoken opposition to the department, mistook loyalty to Cumberbatch as loyalty to the cause of Black Studies at Connors College. The long suppressed aspirations of many of the Black students had been given new voice by a wind of possibility called Open Admissions sweeping throughout public campuses, the most promising result of the student unrest inaugurated by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Vietnam war. With the passionate over-simplification of their years, they could not hear that Cumbah Smith’s thirst for self-aggrandizement was no useful substitute for a creatively conceived and executed Afrocentric curriculum. Complicated by the fact that a largely silent group of students together with members of the junior Black faculty did not accept the idea of Smith as their choice of chairman, but this group looked upon Dee as the other viable Black alternative. After all, she and Cumbah

 had been at Connors the longest. But this was 1969, Nation time, a time for new beginnings based upon the old ways rediscovered. And in the errors of an incomplete vision, none of the group was willing to suggest publicly at this racial juncture the idea of selecting a Black woman ‘over’ a Black man, no matter how incompetent. Complicated by the fact that, even though she knew she could do a better job than Cumberbatch one hand tied behind her, the last thing in the world Deotha Chambers wanted in her already complex life was the chairmanship of an embattled Black Studies Department. Complicated by the fact that the only other possible candidate was Isabella Gomez D’Avila, young militant Puerto Rican Nationalist whose worst furies had recently been redirected towards all things Black. And true, Cumberbatch Smith had declared war upon her at first sight, fueled by his woman hatred and distrust of all things Latin. Deotha felt conflicted and uncomfortable whenever she thought of Isabella, whose abrasive manner and quick angers too often led Deotha to ignore the basic commonality of their visions. Opening her consciousness to the racial complications brewing at Connors made Dee shudder, and gave her an instant headache. A relevant Black education. IF NOT NOW, WHEN? The very thought of it was an excitement that percolated through Deotha also, that kept her thinking and dreaming of the possibility for Black students at Connors. She could see the dangers of a limited vision at the same time as she felt her own reluctance to implement any broader one. This hastily called meeting tonight was not really going to change anything and it would mean that she and the children would not be able to get out of the city until Saturday morning, which meant it would be late afternoon before, excited and whiny, they would pull into the neatly flowered driveway at the end of Princess Lane, second

 exit off Route 95 East to Apponaug. And that would be the equivalent of a whole extra day lost. Laura. A whole extra night, which was where it was really at. Besides, who could she get to stay with the kids on such short notice? Maybe they could sleep over at Selena’s since it was Friday but then it’d be such a hassle getting them away in the morning and back upstairs to pack. But maybe not since they really wanted to go to the country. But she knew from experience past that the kids were good company for Selena’s daughter Cherrie, and their playing together gave Selena some much-needed extra sleep on a Saturday morning. Warm and generous to a fault, Selena’s lack of interest in any pursuit that might mean an end to some pleasurable moment for herself would, without fail, result in her somehow aiding and abetting the natural Saturday morning procrastinations of the Chambers kids. It would be nightfall before they pulled into the hedge-lined driveway. Laura already in the doorway, having watched them turn into the Lane. Maybe Mattie next door could come over, but Dee would have to try and catch her before Mattie left for music lessons since Friday was an early day for her from school… Dee reached for the cream- colored wall-phone in the dining area, and the instrument jangled under her fingers. “Oh shit!” she mumbled as she raised the receiver to her ear, impatience dripping out of her voice like acid leaving it chill and uninflected and smoothly neutral. “Hello?” “Leave our department alone, lezzie!” The angry young male voice was abrupt and almost a shade embarrassed, Dee thought later. A sharp intake of breath was rapidly followed by a click-click interrupting Dee’s startled “Who is this?”, even as her gritty snicker blanketed the surprise in her voice and she found herself holding a dead phone.

 Without hanging up, Deotha reached out and thumbed the cradle-hook, dialing Mattie’s number and hoping she hadn’t already missed the girl. As the phone buzzed on the other end, Dee raised her left foot to the seat of the chair over which she was bent, telephone held scrunched between ear and shoulder, tying her sneaker as the phone buzzed on. Had that voice been at all familiar beyond young Black urban male? One of her students, perhaps? The slightest suggestion perhaps of a West-Indian cadence behind “Leave our department alone, Lezzie!” Dee snickered once more, humorlessly, as the receiver was picked up on the other end. “Hello, Mattie? Dee, next-door. Are you free tonight by any chance? I might have to go out, an emergency meeting at school.” She was the only mother she knew who felt called upon to tell her sitters why she wanted them. As Dee listened, she patted her rear pocket to check for her money, at the same time eyeing the cluttered table for her pocketbook and car-keys. “Okay, good, Mattie” I’ll buzz you after they’re in bed or else I’ll call if the plans change. I really appreciate this. Gotta run.” Dee’s quick fingers reseated the phone as she grabbed up the keys luckily spotted peeking out from under a newspaper. The afternoon sun filled the space with watered light. From midway up the wall over the phone, a calmly beautiful Watusi princess eyed Deotha quizzically from the framed LIFE Magazine photograph that hung against a three-foot wide panel of once elegant straw cloth wallpaper, its delicate pampas green now faded by the fierce setting sun which shone each evening through the terrace doors 20 stories up over the Hudson River.

* * *

Deotha eased her sneakered pressure from the gas-pedal, consciously forcing herself into a calm outside of panic. She felt the worn back tires of the old Rambler soften as they heeled into the last

 deep curve of the 95th St. traverse through Central Park. On either side of the sunken roadbed, the spring-tender trees were adolescent green and pale, a-shudder with noisy grackles whose iridescent wings were sleek as the curly hairs escaping along Pia Milano’s neck. But Pia’s hair had more life to it than the bird’s wings -- it was almost like Black people’s hair, especially when it had just been cut. Dee pulled into the right lane and shot on her turn signal, but the red light caught her at Fifth Avenue and she creaked to an abrupt halt. This was no light to run, ever. Already trucks and busses honked and elbowed their way across the fashionable intersection and past the bubbling fountains of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Spring Show banners were already flying. No matter how old the car, good brakes were one thing Dee always insisted upon having in any car she was going to drive her kids around in. If shocks went they went, but good brakes and solid tires were just common sense. Living defensively, Dee thought, and a comfort too, besides. Solid tires. Solid tires. A sudden image of the worn and patched spare tire doing service now as the rear left wheel vaulted into Dee’s vision superimposed upon the red streetlight. BLOCK IT! BLOCK IT! The censor that lived behind her left ear pushed the image away. She hated to get caught at this particular light, because it seemed to stay red forever. But no sense in getting upset this close, the worst was over. Dee glanced at her watch, one eye out for the changing light. 3:05. Maybe she was 10 minutes fast today. If so and she made all the lights down Fifth edging left as she went she could swing right into the block and maybe not have to stop for the school-busses still blocking the street and then she’d only be five minutes late which wasn’t so terrible since the traffic today was the worst she’d seen in weeks and at any rate certainly worse than yesterday when she’d been almost exactly on time. At least she’d left the same time and only been five

 minutes late. For Deotha Chambers on time meant somebody else didn‘t mind the wait. She swung left into 82nd Street just ahead of the light and of course there were no parking spots. Double-parked cars and busses narrowed the uneven spaces, interspersed with peaks of dirty melting snow. To make matters worse, a honking van forced Dee to circle the block, cursing under her breath. She hoped someone in the school– office had been looking out of the window and had seen her car as she passed, so at least they would know that today her heart was in the right place. She swung into the block again, the huge grey Museum across the Avenue looming in her rear-view mirror like a warning saint. The absence of mothers gathered and milling about in front of the school told Dee that she was indeed actually and unavoidably late. There were always a few thin, well-dressed and softly apologetic young white women who actually lived in this neighborhood, and they arrived every afternoon on foot to walk their children home. There was even a chauffeured car that picked Eric up daily. On the days that Eric’s mother came along with the car, she too looked softly apologetic, but she still had her driver park, double or triple, directly in front of the school entrance. Private cars and private school busses clotted the short street. Dee finally nosed the salt-streaked old car triumphantly into an almost spot just vacated by a double-parked van from the Yeshiva up the street and ignoring the loud beeps from the Willow Car driver who’d been waiting for the spot, she shifted into park, jammed on the emergency, and grabbed her bag as her sneakers hit the slush- rotten snow. Dee shrugged her shoulder straight inside her dull green corduroy jacket, composing herself as she entered the school. Down a brief hallway, and she stepped into her son’s brightly decorated classroom.

 Pia Milano looked up quickly from the desk where she was seated, edges of light catching her dark lashes briefly. For Pia, it was the end of a week of four year olds, all healthy, bright children, wired for security. And this week they all seemed to have spring in their bones. For the first time that school-year Deotha noticed that Miss Milano’s wrap-around smock was a lot like her own mother’s post-depression apron, and this made the usually snappy broad- hipped woman with the sparkling smile seem almost familiar. “Oh good! Hello, there.” Pia Milano’s voice lifted, a curl in the middle. “Ronald, your mother’s here.” Slid back down again, smoothly. “How are you, Mrs. Andrews?” the teacher directed her smile and eyes a fraction lower that Deotha’s, but already Dee could feel herself becoming the late and guilty scholarship mother reacting to criticism. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she began, “the traffic…” Miss Milano pushed herself away from the desk and stood up, her round black eyes unaccented and without reflection. She caught her upper lip for a moment as if reaching for the faint dark fuzz above her mouth. Her sturdy country-girl’s neck arched downward into fine strong breasts, apron-draped and tame as a teacher, but a light musk rose from the curls behind her ears, from her slanted collarbones and from beneath the one loose strand of dark, escaping hair. Was there the shade of a quirk in the corner of her smiling mouth? Were those flashing teeth really calling calling calling to Dee as she had heard women calling to her before, in silence, sometimes even before they themselves knew the name of the sound of such calling? Without thought, Pia’s tongue flicked quickly over her full lips, and Deotha dropped her eyes in a momentary confusion of time and place. Suddenly anxious not to lose contact with the other woman, Pia Milano moved forward, closing the distance between them until she stood quite close to Deotha, her fragrance drifting up toward the

 brown-skinned woman. Pia turned her head slightly and their eyes met once again. Instantly, Dee’s retina took in an indelible print of desire calling and answering need and this image was totally inconsistent with anything happening in the material world, or even consciously recorded by either woman. But that print would remain in indelible living color within Dee’s image files until some distant moment when it was needed and would then be resurrected, as would be the esters rising from Pia’s body in delicate waves that faded from her nostrils even as she registered them. “Yes, isn’t the weekend traffic in the block getting terrible?” Pia cocked her head slightly, the shorter of the two. “Is Ronald going away this weekend, Mrs. Andrews? He’s been very excited all day.” Deotha wanted to say, “I’m using Chambers again, because that’s my own name,” but she’d wondered about the effect of the divorce upon the children’s scholarships, sensing only too well that her primary protective covering in this alien environment was her position as somebody’s wife and Adrian and Ronald’s mother. “We’re going to visit a friend and maybe do some skiing,” Dee offered, thinking as she spoke that it sounded like a daring and exciting thing to say, an adventure that would disconnect her from the judgmental schoolmarm standing beside her, wreathed in what Deotha felt as a vaguely authoritarian air. Pia’s eyes brightened with surprised interest. “Oh? That sounds like fun. Where are you going?” And for a moment the two women slid out of character again, and Deotha could feel their worlds swooping closer to each other in some dimly understood but potentially dangerous glide. The sweet green air surrounding the house in Apponaug came back to her with an acute and compelling urgency. Maybe she and Laura could take the kids up into Diamond Hill Sunday morning, renting skis in the park at the bottom of the hill.

 “Rhode Island,” Dee answered. “Apponaug.” “Oh. Rhode Island.” The flattened repetition suddenly placed Diamond Hill’s gently homey slope and all of the rest of Rhode Island into their proper and irredeemable perspective. Pia Milano did not sniff, but the tone of her voice clearly indicated she might have as she finished, with an offhand smile, “I didn’t know there was any skiing in Rhode Island.” Deotha straightened her back, emphasizing the difference in height between them as she breezily covered her tracks. “Oh, it’s just some little hill, you know, where the children can practice. Nothing really special.” She recognized immediately that she had blundered into the restricted outskirts of a world with which this woman—whatever her beginnings—had gradually come to identify. And Pia Milano shared that world vicariously with the mothers who considered New Canaan Day School their neighborhood school, and who took their children skiing regularly at the very best ski lodges. The two women moved slowly toward the play area of the large classroom. The teacher reached up to pat her hair back in place and began another provocative smile that transformed her face into Madonna-like softness. “He’s just putting his blocks away.” “How’s Ronno been?” Dee’s query was half in response to Pia’s smile, half to fill the time. Placing the last large cardboard block resolutely upon its shelf, the sturdy round-faced little boy came bounding across the room toward the women, only to swerve at the last possible moment and disappear into the boys’ toilet on his way past the coat corner. “Oh Ronald’s been very cooperative recently, Mrs. Andrews. Except for rest period, of course. But he always seems to save it for then. Like clockwork. As soon as I turn down the lights and everyone else is quiet. I put him right beside my desk so I can keep my eye on him while I do my papers, but that does not seem to make a bit of

 difference.” Pia chuckled in exasperated amusement. “But as soon as I turn on my desk lamp and start to work, I can count on Ronald’s starting to act up. It’s like he thinks he’s invisible. Do you have any idea why he acts up like that during rest? Deotha widened her mouth into a smile that felt more like a grimace, for she was grinding her back teeth at the same time. “I can’t imagine,” she said into the air. She eyes the other side of the room where the door to the boys’ toilet stood mutely shut, beside the brightly colored coat-stalls, each with a child’s photograph thumbtacked into the wood. “At home, when I’m working on my music, I work at the table in the dining room and both kids play in the living room. They know almost nothing they do will disturb me as long as it’s not dangerous. It’s like when I’m working there’s a force-field across the threshold and they both know better than to step across it. Adrian and Ronno can get pretty boisterous sometimes but as long as it stays below a dull roar and nobody gets hurt, they know I won’t say anything. And it works out all right. They get a little ruckus and I get a little time. It beats television.” Deotha turned her face back to the teacher. She was smiling appreciatively at the thought of those times, and the children’s fine- tuned sense of just how much noise was not too much. She could not say how terribly precious those moments of complete submersion into her work were to her. Miss Milano looked directly up into Dee’s eyes, a slight but definite reproach written into the lines of her forehead. Dee felt her hackles rise. She hated being patronized, particularly by the New Canaan School staff and teachers. They always did it so delicately and with such attempts at liberal understanding that she found it often impossible to get a handle with which to sling it back into their faces.

 Pia Milano spoke with some hesitation. “Oh yes, that certainly would explain it, wouldn’t it? but do you think that’s a very good idea?” The two women stopped walking. Dee’s smile faded abruptly. “Well, that’s the only time I have to do my own work,” she said wryly, eyeing the opposite side of the room and wondering what was taking the boy so long. The unspoken rest dangled between the two women, defensive, explanatory, and impatient. The teacher sought Dee’s face again, her round white face sincere and almost fierce in its earnest appeal. After all, she had been the first teacher on the Board who had fought hard to have Black students be given scholarships to the prestigious school. Pia Milano felt herself committed to making this experiment work, and she felt that her concern certainly gave her the right to encourage the correct behavior. She was sure that Mrs. Andrews was one who would want the best for her children, once she knew what the best was. “But Mrs. Andrews, you’ve got to remember, you will always be able to write your music but Ronald will only be young once.” Her voice was pleading rather than reproachful. Did it really have to be one or the other? The tasteful little hallway of the Lower School began to heave as Dee felt guilt rising into her mouth like a wall of vomit. “By the way, it’s Ms. Chambers,” she said, carefully, “I use my own name now.” Before Pia could reply, the door across the classroom opened and a small beige figure in a burgundy velour pullover came hurtling out toward them. Pia turned. “And here’s Ronald, all set for his weekend. Doesn’t he look pleased with himself, Ms. Chambers?” Pia’s voice carried the conspiratorial lilt grownups sometimes use to re-establish connection around children they do not wish to exclude. But Deotha was not having any such false truce. Racism yawned like a fetid gulch between them, and heavy gates of self-protection

 clanged shut around her. She reached down to give her son a tight squeeze in greeting, releasing him with a smile as Ronald pulled on his jacket. Her fingers lingered for a moment upon his cheek and then gathered up the plaid book bag he had dropped at her feet. “Have a good time skiing this weekend, Ronald,” said Pia Milano, patting the little boy’s crispy curls, so like his mother’s. “You too, Ms. Chambers, have a good time.” Ronald and his mother were already at the door. Dee turned, her smile already on automatic. “Why thank you, Ms. Milano, you too.” Pia walked back into her classroom and began to clear her desk. She felt a stab of disappointment. She had sensed the rapidity with which a certain intensity had drained away between herself and Ronald’s mother. The boy was certainly bright enough. She found his troublesome parent intriguing and infuriating, --a pedagogical challenge. Outreach to the shifting school population. And Ronald was clearly in that category. On scholarship, Black, divorced parents, a working mother…And she was such a busy one, too, from all reports. Of course the boy could be expected to have problems. How surprising the mother didn’t see her responsibilities more clearly, with such bright children, too. The older sister was quite quick, also. And the mother appeared to be quite intelligent, but clearly she was one of these women lately who were too independent for their own good, and of course it was the children who had to pay for it. Mothers were not career women. The idea. Pia untied her apron and flicked off the light, checking her room one last time. A vision flashed suddenly across her consciousness, Deotha Chambers’ strong shapely hands shepherding her son out of the schoolhouse door.

Dee angled the old car up Madison Avenue, buffeted by a fulminating rage which covered a nagging question. Was it true she

 could only express her own life at the expense of her children? She knew only too well the elusiveness of such questions, shrouded in the homily of only time will tell. No answer, only a fear. The little boy in the seat beside her talked on. Dee’s eyes slid sideways for a moment, relishing the animated dance of Ronno’s stubby little hands as he illustrated his day’s journey. The curve of his jaw and the set of his young mouth reminded Dee with a tug of the faded pictures on her mother’s bureau, except his open excited face was beautiful in a way her closed and defensive one had never been at his age. Dee braked abruptly to avoid a swerving bus. Automatically her right arm shot out across the little form in the passenger seat. She was not yet accustomed to the new seat belts she’d just had installed bullying and bribing the children into the habit of always using them. Force of habit, that gesture that was to outlast both of children’s childhoods. Adrian, jitter box tomboy helpful beyond her years, Ronald of the soft intractable hair and fiercely beautiful mouth. Was it really them who were paying for that psychic space Dee found it so hard to come by? It was less than a year now since Dee had made up her mind to wrest, demand, connive, steal, pillage, strong-arm, ransom or bulldoze at least three hours every single weekend in which she could be uninterruptedly with her music-- reading, writing, picking it out on her beloved ill-tuned white elephant of a piano-- sound and vibrations come alive in her fingertips setting up a net of vision that felt like flying. Even belted in, the little boy’s energy warmed the car, Ronno’s chatter lapped at the edges of Dee’s thoughts as she moved them uptown through the swelling weekend traffic. From time to time she gave a short encouraging ‘um-hum’ to some particularly focused

 eddy, and that response allowed the stream to continue flowing easily. The specific contents of his childish conversation passed through the mothering section of her consciousness, registering upon her third ear, filtered through that particular faculty whose only function was to alert the next level of concern to any deviation from the wide range of possibilities and occurrences which represented a four-and-a-half- year-old Black boy’s average day at a upper East Side private school with liberal pretentions. As they crossed 110th Street, that faculty registered an alert. “…to the country tonight?” and the question in the little boy’s voice brought his conversational flow skidding to an expectant halt as he turned to Dee, waiting for an answer. Dee’s censor processed the question with lightning speed through a scatter of unattended considerations and decisions that had been percolating within their own perspectives and without the benefit of conscious attention through the whole time Dee had been dealing with the events at New Canaan and their psychic fallout. “We’re not leaving for Rhode Island till tomorrow, Ronno. We’ll start out early in the morning and it’ll be nice. But I have a meeting tonight.” It was not until she began to answer her son that Dee realized she had, in fact, made up her mind to go to the meeting that evening. Ronno’s disappointment was immediate and unequivocal. “Ah, Ma-a-a! Not tonight! I want to drive to the country at night, mommy!” The little boy flopped back in his seat, his small body radiating disgruntle. He was silent for a minute, long curly lashes drooping, almost close to tears. Brightening, suddenly, Ronald turned a mischievous eye upon his mother. “Who’s going to stay with us, Daddy?” The innocence of the little boy’s question did not for a moment conceal the contradictory

 pressures within him, nor could it dull the unerringly accurate barbs of the perceptive child’s unconscious. Daddy? With a jolt Dee remembered. Of course. This is the week for Phillip to have the kids from six to nine on Friday night. Well, too bad. If I’m not home by 9:00 he’ll have to drop them off at Mattie’s or Selena’s, and one of them will put the children to bed. Or maybe I’ll let them stay up until I get back. Shouldn’t be past 10:00. But that would mean their sleeping late tomorrow and then no early start. On the other hand, we could pack after I come home … I hate not being here when Phil brings the kids back. He’s such a shit with his nasty remarks to the kids about mother always being too busy .... Deotha swung the weary Rambler along the upper edge of Central Park. Despite the decaying snow on the ground, the willows bordering the underground stream that ran along the park’s north boundary had a rosy tinge. She had already noted them with pleasure that morning, looking out along Riverside Drive from her 20th floor terrace as the children had breakfast. Spring was coming, thank god. Again. Earth has not decided to give up. Yet. Dee had come to feel a definite stab of relief in recent years when the new season finally showed signs of beginning, even though she had always insisted that spring was her least favorite season. Nevertheless, it always felt to Dee as if the earth had given humanity another brief reprieve, opened herself again to possibility and salvation. “No, Ronno. Your father’s not going to stay with you. Selena will get you ready for bed if I’m not home by the time you get back. Or you and Addie can start packing your knapsacks for tomorrow so we can leave early. It might even be fun to start out at dawn. What do you think? We’ve never done that before.” Ronald grinned at

 the idea of a new adventure. Dee wondered if L&F Tires was open that early. “What did you have for lunch today?” New Canaan was noted for its Friday lunches. “Some kind of lamb balls and teensy little spaghetti letters and beans and a yucky desert with real marshmallows all over it.” Good, Dee thought. That means only a light supper, and if Addie gets home from her date with Persia on time we’ll be in good shape. Persia’s mother’s supposed to drop her off at 5:00. “Sounds like a good meal. How about grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches for supper tonight?” The little boy’s eyes lit up, even though it was not an infrequent treat, only his favorite, for the time being. “Yeah! Goody! And I get to hold the toasty-iron this time and Addie doesn’t hold it at all because she held it both times last time?” By now Ronno was jumping up and down in his seat belt as they rounded the last curve and headed up Morningside Drive. Dee smiled to herself. She knew the little boy was pushing his advantage, having mommy in the car all to himself. She knew he was also cashing in a bit on her guilt about the meeting tonight preventing their precious night jaunt to Apponaug. 4:15. The street light at Broadway and 123rd street seemed endless. “We’ll see when Addie comes home.” Dee remembered last Sunday afternoon, as she stood in the kitchen slicing carrots and watching the late winter rain. She kept one ear on the children’s patter beyond the half-wall in the living- room, where Addie and Ronno and Selena’s Cherrie were trying to decide what indoor game to play. Adrian’s big-sister voice, “I know, let’s play going to a meeting!” Ronno and Cherrie’s excited assent, “yeah, yeah!” Amused and curious, Deotha moved to the end of the tiny

 kitchen so she could look past the piano into the living room. This was a new game, and she wondered what it would entail. Seven-year-old Adrian, head in the air, was bustling around the room in quickstep time, gathering up newspapers and magazines under one arm as she went. Her thick dark eyebrows were pulled down in an exaggerated frown as she moved back and forth from chair to couch to table. The other two children followed behind her, lifting up objects and putting them back down, shaking their heads back and forth. “Where’s my papers, where’s my papers, where’s my papers?” the little girl panted, shaking her tousled head from side to side in an imitation of Deotha so precise and evocative that it left mommy weak with embarrassed and silent laughter in the kitchen. Dee had not realized before how deeply the pressures of the Black Studies controversy at Connors had filtered down into the children’s daily lives. The light changed and Dee edged into the northbound traffic on Broadway.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WE WANT TO FIRST HONOR the many varied forms of work done by all teachers. In particular, Iemanjá wants to recognize the importance of her sister, Tara, who has always lent her the words for getting out and then going back in. Iemanjá wants to also honor and express gratitude to Marilyn Ewing, her fourth and fifth grade teacher, for cracking open a new world where mutual care is priority, and careful attention is paid to the richness of experience before ever putting words to paper. In further tribute to formative moments of guidance and kinship, Miriam would like to acknowledge Andrea Spain, doctoral student and adjunct instructor teaching in the SUNY Buffalo Comparative Literature department back in 2003. As a teacher, Andrea lived Donna Haraway’s and Elizabeth Grosz’s theories of queer embodiment, conjuring for her undergraduate students—Miriam among them— the numerous possible visions of how a rigorously examined feminist life might be enacted. We have both been in awe of the relationships that we have sustained around the CUNY teaching materials of three of the writers in this series: Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara. The scholars who have spent time on these chapbooks have engaged in endless hours of playing, scheming, and editing with us. Thank you Lauren Bailey, William Camponovo, Makeba Lavan, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Öykü Tekten and Wendy Tronrud. We also want to thank the CUNY scholars working on Lorde who spent time discussing her work with us, among them Kristin Moriah, Tonya Foster, and Meredith Benjamin. Carmen Kynard sat with us over pierogis and borscht in a dark little restaurant in midtown, sharing her experience as a teacher at John Jay College. Her insight and mentorship have been invaluable

 to us. Jerry Markowitz, also at John Jay, helped guide us toward a better understanding of Lorde’s work to establish a Black and Puerto Rican Studies department there in the 70s. Simone Bikel Allmond, Jacqueline Brown, and Sarah Schulman generously took the time to share their memories of studying with Lorde at Hunter College. Strangers and friends offered us space to do this work—opening up rituals of discussion and collaboration. Michael Taussig lent his house in the woods to the editors of the CUNY teaching materials in this series. There, we convened next to the fire, in the river—and especially at the kitchen table—amid a treasure trove of books and artworks to help inspire our writing. The Homostead, a dreamy off- the-grid utopia in the middle of Atlanta, hosted Iemanjá. She thanks those queers, especially Tanner Slick, who fed her, lent her bikes, and talked to her for as long as the night persisted. The most important space was of course the archive at Spelman College, where Kassandra Ware lent her expertise warmheartedly. Lorde’s children, Jonathan Rollins and Elizabeth Rollins-Lorde, generously directed us to Regula Noetzli of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Many thanks to Regula for her swift and precise responses to our requests and for her work on behalf of the estate of Audre Lorde. Blanche Wiesen Cook helped facilitate contact with the Lorde estate. Finally, the family of editors at Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and at the Center for the Humanities have provided infinite support through this process. Josh Schneiderman and Megan Paslawski double-checked our transcriptions against the originals. Kendra Sullivan offered consistent wisdom, especially in her ability to organize conversations amongst all the editors of this series in fun and generative settings. Stephon Lawrence edited with swift skill and juggled a hectic publication schedule with finesse. Ammiel Alcalay and Kate Tarlow Morgan have accommodated our passion

 for this project since the beginning. We want to thank them for their editing and their strong encouragement throughout.

 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Easily summarized by her officially recognized merits, AUDRE LORDE’s life is also understood through her evolution as a learner and a teacher. Born in Harlem in 1934 to Grenadian parents, Lorde grew up feeling like an outsider. Excluded from the games of her two older sisters, raised by a mother furiously committed to correcting her waywardness, and instructed by punitive teachers at Catholic schools where she was the sole Black student, Lorde’s intellectual life grew out of an early experience of being different. Amid the lonely feelings that accompanied her sense of being outside, Lorde would begin her experiments in creative identity formation, such that the experience of being not them, would transform into the activity of imagining me. This realization of self as a poetic-aesthetic activity would ultimately drive both her art practice and her teaching practice. As a teenager, Lorde found others with whom she could, at least partially, share the position of outsider. At Hunter High, an all-girls school for gifted students, Lorde ran with a group of working and middle class girls—including a teenaged Diane di Prima—who called themselves “The Branded.” They skipped school to write and recite poetry together in downtown cafés, or to hold séances invoking the spirits of dead poets—together sustaining an attachment to learning outside formal educational environments. She moved, at age twenty, to Cuernavaca, a bohemian enclave on the outskirts of Mexico City, and studied for a year at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. There, she was inspired by learning amidst other brown-skinned people. In that environment—amongst the sweeping mountain vistas of Cuernavaca—Lorde realized that access to beauty is not only for the rich, and decided it was her task as a poet to reflect this access accurately and in a way that could be heard and shared.

 Upon returning to New York, Lorde pursued her BA at Hunter College and her masters from Columbia University. Her most enriching moments of learning in the classroom would come later, however, when she began to teach. Her time at Tougaloo College as a writer-in-residence confirmed in her the need to take herself seriously as a poet, as well as revealed within her the desire to teach. Inspired by her students’ use of her poetry workshop to explore their personal commitments to political and racial struggle, Lorde’s activist teaching began to take form. The collaboration produced a magazine of student poems and inspired Lorde to compose the body of writing that would constitute her poetry collection, Cables to Rage. Returning to New York, Lorde began teaching in the CUNY system, beginning in the SEEK program at City College (1968-69), then at Lehman College (1969-70), John Jay (1970-81) and finally, Hunter College (1981-85), where the Women’s Poetry Center is dedicated to her. Throughout her years at CUNY, Lorde’s work became internationally known. Her teaching remained central to her life, however, and her work in the classroom inspired many of her poems, essays, and speeches. Beginning in 1984, while she was on leave at Hunter College, she took a position at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. There, she brought together a group of Afro-Germans in her workshops, igniting the Afro-German movement that began with invigorating discussion, and her students’ newspaper Brown published in 1986, entitled Showing our Colors. Fighting liver cancer as she taught in New York and Berlin, Lorde eventually left teaching and made her permanent home in St. Croix until her death in 1992.

IEMANJÁ BROWN is a teacher and a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She works at Queens College, The Cooper Union, and in the field of New York City. Her activist life is largely devoted to shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure.

 MIRIAM ATKIN, PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, is a writer based in New York City. Her work has been largely concerned with the possibilities of poetry as an oral medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music and dance. She has taught composition and poetry at CUNY, and is a member of Kaf, an art and publishing collective.

 LOST & FOUND

LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes original texts by figures central to and associated with New American Poetry. Poised at the intersection of scholarly investigation, innovative publishing, and cultural preservation, each Lost & Found chapbook emphasizes the importance of collaborative and archival research. Lost & Found is characterized by its careful attention to the interplay of poetry, poetics, friendship, and politics. Working in personal and institutional archives located throughout the country and abroad, Lost & Found editors illuminate understudied aspects of literary, cultural, and political history. The research at the heart of Lost & Found is conducted by students and fellows under the guidance of an extended scholarly community, and supported by private donors, foundations, and the Center for the Humanities. Lost & Found is funded in part through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, The Provost’s Office at the Graduate Center,CUNY , Early Research Initiative, the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund, André Spears, Margo & Anthony Viscusi, and Engaging the Senses Foundation. Each year, these eVorts result in the production of a new Lost & Found series that includes extra-poetic material such as correspondence, journals, and transcriptions of lectures. Working alongside living writers and their heirs, the imprint also organizes public programs that promote new, cooperative models of textual scholarship and publication. In addition, Lost & Found has joined with select publishers for book length projects emerging from our research, appearing under the general title Lost & Found Elsewhere. Lost & Found is available through Small Press Distribution and through our website at: lostandfoundbooks.org.

 SERIES VII (Fall, 2017) 1 Audre Lorde: “I teach myself in outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi & an Excerpt from Deotha (Miriam Atkin and Iemanjá Brown, editors) 2 Toni Cade Bambara: “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” & Other Writings (Parts I & II) (Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed, editors). 3 June Jordan: “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 (Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev, editors) 4 Dr. Jack Forbes: “Yanga Ya:” Selected Poems & The Goals of Education (Parts I & II) (William Camponovo, editor; including a preface by Jimmie Durham, and facsimile insert, “What Is Time?”) 5 Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar: “Querido Pablito”/“Julissimo querido,” Selected Correspondence 1958-1971 (Parts I & II) (Ammiel Alcalay, Jacqui Cornetta, Alison Macomber, and Alexander Soria, editors)

SERIES VI (Spring, 2016) 1 Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Parts I & II) (William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, and Öykü Tekten, editors; including a preface by Anne Waldman) 2 Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (Iris Cushing, editor) (with interview insert) 3 Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (Iemanjá Brown and Iris Cushing, editors) 4 Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Parts I & II) (Ammiel Alcalay, Wendy Tronrud, editors; including a preface by Diane di Prima)

SERIES V (Spring, 2015) 1 Kathy Acker: Homage to Leroi Jones & Other Early Works (Gabrielle Kappes, editor) 2 William S. Burroughs: The Travel Agency is on Fire (Alex Wermer-Colan, editor)

 3 Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan (Zohra Saed, editor) 4 Jean Sénac: The Sun Under the Weapons, Correspondence & Notes from Algeria (Parts I & II) (Kai Krienke, editor)

SERIES IV (Winter, 2013) 1 Vincent Ferrini: Before Gloucester (with facsimile insert) (Ammiel Alcalay and Kate Tarlow Morgan, editors) 2 Edward Dorn: Abilene! Abilene!: Variorum Edition with Appendices & Commentary (Parts I & II) (with essay insert) (Kyle Waugh, editor) 3 Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974 (Parts I & II) (Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, erica kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Wendy Tronrud, and Ammiel Alcalay, editors) 4 Pauline Kael & Robert Duncan: Letters, 1945-1946 (Parts I & II) (Bradley Lubin, editor) 5 Helene Johnson: After the Harlem Renaissance (Emily Claman, editor)

SERIES III (Spring, 2012) 1 Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Anne Donlon, editor) 2 Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor) 3 John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (Michael Seth Stewart, editor) 4 Diane di Prima: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Boˇziˇcevi´c, editors) 5 Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor) 6 Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (Megan Paslawski, editor) 7 Joanne Kyger: Letters to & from (Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, editors)

 SERIES II (Spring, 2011) 1 Selections from El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn 1962-1964 (Margaret Randall, guest editor) 2 Diane di Prima: The Mysteries of Vision, Some Notes on H.D. (Ana Boˇziˇcevi´c, editor) 3 Diane di Prima: R.D.’s H.D. (Ammiel Alcalay, editor) 4 Robert Duncan: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh, and Rachael Wilson, editors) 5 Jack Spicer’s Translation of Beowulf: Selections (Parts I & II) (David Hadbawnik & Sean Reynolds, guest editors) 6 Muriel Rukeyser: “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive (Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor)

SERIES I (Winter, 2009) 1 Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters, 1959-1960 (Claudia Moreno Pisano, editor) 2 The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Selections (Parts I & II) (Josh Schneiderman, editor) 3 Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers (Stefania Heim, editor) 4 Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections (Parts I & II) (Brian Unger, editor) 5 Robert Creeley: Contexts of Poetry, with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals (Ammiel Alcalay, editor)

 LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE Robert Duncan in San Francisco by Michael Rumaker Ammiel Alcalay and Megan Paslawski, editors (City Lights, 2012) Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor (Feminist Press, 2013) A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester by Peter Anastas (Lost & Found Elsewhere and Back Shore Press, 2013) Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters by Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn Claudia Moreno Pisano, editor (U. of New Mexico Press, 2013) Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners by John Wieners Michael Seth Stewart, editor (City Lights, 2015) For further information visit: lostandfoundbooks.org.

 The Center for the Humanities encourages collaborative and creative work in the humanities at CUNY and across the city through seminars, conferences, publications and exhibitions. Free and open to the public, our programs and exhibitions aim to inspire sustained, engaged conversation and to forge an open and diverse intellectual community.

The Graduate Center is the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York. OVering more than thirty doctoral degrees from Anthropology to Urban Education, and fostering globally significant research in a wide variety of centers and institutes, the GC provides rigorous academic training in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Through its extensive public programs—lectures, conferences, performances, and exhibitions—the Graduate Center contributes to the intellectual and cultural life of New York City and aYrms its commitment to the premise that knowledge is a public good.

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