The MFA Program's special initiative, “Archives as Muse: A Harlem Storytelling Project" invites you to a symposium that considers how creatives use the archives with a special focus on the work of award winning writer, journalist, and educator, Herb Boyd.
William Gibbons is a librarian and an archivist. He teaches urban policy, library science, and archival research at The City College of New York (CCNY).
He is a resource on Harlem and gentrification, helping researchers become knowledgeable library users to use libraries and archives to their fullest potential. His writing and research are focused on curating and preserving evidence of cultural heritage unseen.
Educated in Detroit, Michigan, public schools through undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he attended graduate school in New York at Pratt Institute and the New School for Social Research.
Recognized by the American Library Association (ALA) in in 2022, for the care he brings to his local and campus communities, Gibbons was selected from more than 1,300 nominations from library users across the country.
American Library Association (ALA) – CCNY librarian receives I Love My Librarian Award
Professor Gordon Thompson has a laudable career spanning nearly 24 years of teaching and service at City College, Louisiana State University, and Stanford University. As director of the Black Studies Program, he had a record of administrative leadership, including planning, budgeting for and managing an academic program. As creator, principal investigator, and director of the RAP-SI project of the Black Male Initiative, he demonstrated the ability to successfully organize a staff and build a service-oriented mentoring program. As director of the Langston Hughes Festival Committee, he has been in continuous service to the Committee since 1990. As professor of African American and American literature in the English Department he has demonstrated a strong publication record with scholarly expertise in the area of the African American narrative praxis. Lastly, as a scholar, he has several peer-reviewed publications, is a frequent participant at national and international conferences and is the editor/co-editor of several books.
Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter (Henry Holt) and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion (Grove/Atlantic), named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer, Salon, Orion and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She currently serves as the 2020-2021 Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities & Arts at The City College of NY, CUNY.
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean.
She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.
Herb Boyd (born November 1, 1938) is an awarding winning author and an esteemed journalist. He has written or edited over 20 books and published countless articles for national magazines and newspapers; including New York’s Amsterdam News. His books, Baldwin’s Harlem, a biography of James Baldwin, and Black Detroit, A Peoples History of Self Determination were finalists for NAACP Images Awards. Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America: An Anthology (One World/Ballantine, 1995), co-edited with Robert Allen of the Black Scholar journal, won the American Book Award for nonfiction.
In 1999, Boyd won three first-place awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists for his articles. Among his most popular books are Black Panthers for Beginners (Writers & Readers, 1995); Autobiography of a People: Three Centuries of African American History Told By Those Who Lived It (Doubleday, 2000); Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century (South End Press, 2002); The Harlem Reader (Crown Publishers, 2003); We Shall Overcome: A History of the Civil Rights Movement (Sourcebooks, 2004); and Pound for Pound: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson (Amistad, 2005). Boyd has been inducted into both the Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent and the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame as a journalist.
Along with his writing, Boyd is a national and international correspondent for Free Speech TV. A graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit, Boyd teaches African and African-American History at the College of New Rochelle in the Bronx and is an adjunct instructor at City College in the Black Studies Department.
Elizabeth Mazzola is a Professor of English and Department Chair. Her research and teaching interests focus on medieval and early modern literature, but she also teaches classes on poetry, prison literature, and early women writers.
She’s written five books as well as several articles on these topics, and a current project, provisionally titled “Words on the Street,” investigates the ways early modern ballads depicted women as sources of contagion and disorder.
Sydney Valerio believes we are all a living archive of the stories and places our bodies navigate. As a creative, she is fueled by her professional work as an educator and community cultural worker to create spaces and experiences for all parts of the community to engage with and access.
Her writing is found in anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: Latinetxt. As a Bronx Council on the Arts & NYC Cultural Affairs Department Arts fund recipient, she is creating the creative digital archive project: Perspective Matters-NYC Kid Who’s Now a NYC Adult. She designs and coordinates creative community projects, youth leadership clubs at her high school, and leadership trainings for the New York City delegation of the Angelo del Toro Puerto Rican/Hispanic Youth Leadership Institute. A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at The City College of New York Sydney is currently working on her first book.
As Director of the MFA, Michelle Valladares is committed to recognizing the wealth of Harlem’s literary history and accomplishments. The “Archives as Muse” project offers creative writers an opportunity to explore this history. Valladares is a poet, filmmaker, and creative writing teacher. She is the author of Nortada, the North Wind. Her writing has appeared in Asterix Journal, Upstreet Journal, Clockhouse, the Literary Review, North American Review, and The Women’s Review of Books.
She has been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize Nomination and she was awarded “The Poet of the Year” by the Americas Poetry Festival of New York. She is currently working on a book about faith called Searching for Tara.
Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, curator, and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His research and art address “cultural landscape” in communities of the African diaspora and the archives of African American literature and ephemera.
He is the author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition, and other books. His work has been exhibited and collected by the Autograph London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Berkeley Museum, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, The Special Collections of the McHenry Library UC Santa Cruz, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, among others.
Nelly A. Rosario is a Dominican-American author and creative writing instructor of Song of the Water Saints, winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction and non-fiction works appear in various anthologies and journals. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught.
She was formerly on faculty at Texas State University and a Visiting Scholar in the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. Currently, Rosario is the 2017-18 Schumann Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies in the Latina/o Studies Program at Williams College and also serves as Assistant Director of Writing for the MIT Black History Project.
Mikhal Dekel is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lady Davis Foundation.
She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W. W. Norton 2019), Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014), and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011).
Her articles, translations, and blogs have appeared in The Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review, among many others.
