Event Details - Black Feminist Teacher

 Black Feminist Teacher-Poets of the 1960s and 1970s

This talk highlights research from my new book Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of

Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke University Press, 2024). While these authors are best known for their poetry, fiction, and essays, my research explores their overlapping experiences as professors at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through analysis of their archival teaching materials alongside their published work, I show how these renowned writers were also transformative teachers who developed creative methods of teaching their students both to navigate the world and to change it. I also demonstrate how teaching in CUNY's free and open classrooms fundamentally altered their writing and, with it, the course of American literature and feminist criticism.