Across Generations: Democratic Vistas project, curated by NY State Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones

Unexpected Coalitions: the People’s Poetry of Walt Whitman and June Jordan workshop, led by Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed, weaves the vital legacies of two US poets: Walt Whitman, a European American gay man, and June Jordan, a Jamaican American bisexual woman. Reading across Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” (1871) and Jordan’s “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us” (1980), we will create unexpected coalitions through the process of writing and sharing poetry. We will read passages from both essays, and apply their insights to short writing prompts about present political crises and varied interpersonal needs. We will activate Jordan’s “Poetry for the People” pedagogies with such like-minded poets as Aja Monet and Solmaz Sharif. In the process, we will discuss how to create coalitions across our differences towards transformative care and social wellbeing.

Saturday, May 24 & Saturday, May 31

1 – 2:30 PM

City Lore

56 E 1st St, New York, NY 10003

Free and open to the public

Conor (Coco) Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid, independent scholar-organizer and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023). Coco is co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and serves on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.