The Best Book Group in New York
OK, maybe we’re not the “best book group” in all New York. But back in 2004, author Wayne Barrett nominated us to the Village Voice’s annual “Best Of” list, and so the name Best Book Group (BBG) stuck.
A Visit to City Lore’s Archive
Poetry of Everyday Life Blogpost #24 Produced in collaboration with Voices: Journal of New York Folklore Guest blog by Seth Schonberg, forthcoming in the next
The Dead Among My Phone Contacts
My phone is filling up with the dead.
My friend Michael died last week, barely two months after being diagnosed with cancer. To him, as to my other dead, I owe a debt of memory. Part of this debt is that it is utterly inconceivable for me ever to delete him from the contacts on my cell.
On a Wing and a Prayer: Finding Poetry in the Cliche
Poetry of Everyday Life Blogpost #23 Produced in collaboration with Voices: Journal of New York Folklore “If you want to be a writer,” my high
K’s Ghost City: Haunted by New York’s Vanished Sites
Anyone who has lived in New York for any time soon becomes aware of “Ghost Sites,” places too soon relegated to memory. In this guest blog, Kathryn Adisman explores the places she haunted and that now haunt her.
Folklore’s Four Sisters
We invite you to check out Steve’s new Poetry of Everyday Life blogpost, Folklore’s Four Sisters: Scholarship, Fieldwork, Activism and Artistry. In it he discusses – for those of you who have wondered – just exactly what a folklorist does, and explains this visualization.
I Am Not My Label!
How can the “Where I’m From” Poem Can Help Us Cross the Great Divide? City Lore’s Steve Zeitlin and Bowery Poetry’s Bob Holman take up this question and invite you to take a small step toward bringing this country together in their new blogpost, “I Am Not My Label!
The Giveback
Tim Hernandez, a poet and grandson of a migrant worker, has taken as his life’s work to research the families of all the migrant workers killed in the infamous 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, memorialized in Woody Guthrie and Martin Hoffman’s song “Deportee” – “all they will call you will be deportees.” On air, he told the Parable of the Horse, a tale that has everything to do with kind of work that folklorists and collectors of stories aspire to, as well as the pitfalls we all too often fall into. If you work closely with communities other than your own, heed this tale.
Masked Angels
Stories from Nurses on the Front Lines by Samuel Lee Poetry of Everyday Life Blogpost #18 Intro “Being a folklorist is a bit like being
