Lost & Found Series X Launch: Lois Elaine Griffith

Join Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative in collaboration with Granary Books to celebrate the launch of our Series X archival publications focusing on the literary, visual, and cultural work of Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Since its inception in 1973, this Puerto Rican cultural center has been a site where artists from the Nuyorican and Black arts movements have come to share their work, voices, histories, talents, and language on its stage. This series seeks to reinstate Griffith’s essential role as a founder, and honor Griffith’s stewardship of the Cafe’s archive.

Hear from Griffith and Lost & Found editor and archival collaborator Joseph Cáceres, as they share their journey. Join Griffith, Cáceres and friends for an evening of readings, presentations and conversation. The event will be introduced by Ammiel Alcalay and followed by a book signing.

Free and open to the public and takes place in Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all. Registration required.Read more about the four books of Lost & Found Series X:

• Dedications includes selections from unpublished poetry manuscripts of Griffith’s poetics of memorialization devoted to loved ones and others who died due to sudden illness, during the HIV/AIDS crisis, or the result of American racism.

• “All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) includes a collection of Griffith’s surrealist visual artwork which led to collaborative projects with artists of the feminist, Black and Nuyorican arts movements.

Keeper of the Archive further documents people important to the Cafe’s legacy not found in academic narratives, whose legacies are kept alive through Lois’ meticulous archival work. Through Lois, we are invited to witness relationships between poet and costume designer Marcel Christian, photographers Arlene Gottfried and Tony Gleaton, and the Cafe.

Finally, You See What You See (a collaboration and co-publication with Granary Books) is a collection of Griffith’s picture-poems discovered in a notebook stored among her papers, and represents an aesthetic offering meant to inspire curiosity and collaboration, mirroring the kaleidoscopic vision of both Griffith’s and the Cafe’s aesthetic.

Lois Elaine Griffith is a visual and literary artist of West Indian descent. For 23 years she was professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. As one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, after retiring from the day-to-day business of producing at the Cafe, she established the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project dedicated to the documentation, collection and presentation of evidence of cultural expressions produced at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the latter part of the 20th century. In 2024, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At present, she is working on – Come To Terms/Llegar A Un Acuerdo – a project about knowledges and naming – evidencing for archive.

Joseph Anthony Cáceres is a queer Nuyorican writer, archivist, and scholar. His work has been published in Evergreen Review, Rican Writing, Slice magazine, CURA, and Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, he is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts’ Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant for Fiction, and LAMBDA Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Joseph holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a senior archivist for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project. He is currently working on three book projects revolving around the Cafe’s aesthetic, featuring unpublished works and other archival artifacts that record the forgotten contributions of the Cafe’s founders and affiliated artists.

This event is co-presented Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center and by Granary Books.

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Host or Publisher The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY