Free track counters
Number of Visitors
Many people have contributed and will continue to contribute to this website.  
​This page helps you to find and contact us.

Sara Deniz Akant
Sara Deniz Akant is the author of Babette, selected by Maggie Nelson for the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize, as well as Parades (Omnidawn, 2014) and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions, 2015). Her work has been recognized with fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has appeared most recently in The Brooklyn Rail, The Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner. Akant has taught poetry and writing at the University of Iowa and the City University of New York. 
Sara Deniz Akant's Babette, selected by Maggie Nelson for Rescue Press' Black Box Poetry Prize, mixes motor-thrum with incantation, promising to "make no pattern / known again." Perpetually on the move, Babette's populous—from Penny "turned into a toy" to the always absent, always there "gohst in the glare"—are machines of the living, at once spectre, shell, meat, and instrument. Uneasy in their habits, these poems transition between spaces "not made for inhabitants," sifting through manor walls as easily as fog banks. Babette is subversive, menacing, infectious. "There are hazards to Babette."

Seth
​graves
Seth Graves is a Ph.D. student in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and teaches at Pace University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His journalism, poetry and reviews have appeared most recently in Boog City, Bort Quarterly; H_NGM_N; Barrow Street; No, Dear; and The Boiler Journal. He is Associate Editor of Coldfront Magazine. Click here for the page Seth created.

Luana
​horry
Luana Horry is currently a masters student at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Liberal Studies program. Her academic interests include, but are not limited to, Africana-centered theory, history, womanism, literature, political science, social science, and other related fields. By day, she is an editorial assistant for children's titles at HarperCollins and by night she is a self-proclaimed connoisseur of (many unread) books (that she may have to consider donating someday)! Click here for the page Luana created.

Sheeba johnson
 Sheeba Johnson is a full-time mathematics lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.  Her academic interests include: urban education, mathematics equity, and equal access to higher level mathematics for secondary education. Click here for the page Sheeba created.

Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
Carmen Kynard is an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.  Together, with her students, she maintains this site as a space for thinking about and archiving those thoughts in relation to African American literacies, discourses, and cultures.  For more about her and/or to contact her, please click here for her biographical webpage at this site.

jennifer polish
Jennifer Polish is an instructor of first year composition at CUNY Queens College while pursuing her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a teacher, she is dedicated to student-centered pedagogical practices that create writing environments meant to affirm students’ own expertise while encouraging critical thinking and growth. As a researcher, her interests include affective whiteness in writing classrooms and the intersections of dis/ability, race, and trauma in children’s literature and media. She is currently working on her first novel, a queer YA fantasy, the writing process for which is intimately informed by both her teaching and academic research. Click here for the page Jenn created.
Pluralizing Literacies Blog
by Jennifer Polish
 
Follow Jenn at http://decomposing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/pluralizingliteraciesas she theorizes/reflects/narrates her thinking and learning about African American literacies (or click the image above) and radical teaching in the 21st century.

Anna
​Zeemont
Anna Zeemont is a student in the English PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she concentrates in composition and rhetoric. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of comp/rhet and literature, and include writing pedagogy in secondary and higher education, critical university studies, literacy, science writing, and metafiction. She will begin teaching composition in fall 2016 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY. Click here for the page Anna created.

Our Last Class

Part I: Presentations
  • Give us a progress update and as many details as you can.  Show us something (video, handout)... something concrete, as if you are a classroom teacher, not merely a graduate student. 
  • Expect to give at least a 5-minute overview of your plans, goals, and visions. 
 Final Announcements
Part II: "Where Do We Go from Here?" (Bobby Womack Version): A Guided Writing Activity
  1. Write whatever comes to mind when you hear the question (on paper or on screen)
  2. Be prepared to share what you have written... as a way to bring it into existence.

I. Announcements
Welcome back from Spring Break!  Next week is our last reading assignment.  After that, we move into final projects (the syllabus will remain unchanged as per our vote).

​II. Conversations w/ Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • It seems most in the class read Between the World and Me.  So let's divide up the small group conversations this way: Each Coates reader should partner with a non-Coates reader.  We'll see how it works... in this way, we can bring Coates into conversation with EVERYONE else.
  • In your partnered conversations, share the main points and impressions from your text
  • In your partnered discussions, what does this have to do with AALiteracies?  Black masculinities and literacies? Schooling in the context of race (and countercultures)?
Our Question: What does this mean for classrooms?  for curriculum?  for literacies?
(particularly our time and place given the 120 young black men shackled & arrested in the Bronx last week as the "biggest crime syndicate in NYC history")
III. Open Discussions
IV. Last Hype Presentation (5:55pm): Sara
"Black Boy Interrupted: American Plunder and the Incomplete Life of Jordan Davis"
A Quick Sampling of Videos about Between the World and Me
                                                             LAST NOTE:
  • Sign-up for your chapter in the final reading: True to the Language Game by Keith Gilyard
  • Think about the longtitudinal view: if we think about research and educational change related to African American language and literacies, what do we do in the next five years?  the next ten years?  the next twenty years?

AnnouNcements

The votes are in: The syllabus stays as is! (it was a very close vote)
May 16: Come to class ready to talk about your project.           
May 23: Meet with Carmen one-on-one if you need to.  There is no class this day.  Your final project is due.  This is a FINAL deadline.  
Next Week's readings
Digital versions are available for:  Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males by Tyrone Howard; Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities by Mark Antony Neal 

​Hardcopies are available for: Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Ferguson; We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks; Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race and the Literacies of Urban Youth by Valerie Kinloch;  A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Black Men by David Kirkland ; Keepin It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric by Vorris Nunley
I. Defining HipHop Language/ Linguistics/ Literacies
With a team, define one of these three terms below based on what you read and the talk by Christopher Emdin.  Write it out on the chalkboard OR write it on paper/ screen ready to read aloud to the group.  
  1. Hip Hop Nation Language
  2. Hip Hop Linguistics
  3. Hip Hop Literacies
Emdin's talk here is fundamentally a HipHop Language Performance (even when he is not rhyming)...why?

II. Individual, Informal (and short presentations)

III. Miriam's hype (5:55pm)
I. Announcements
1) Please be ready to vote next week on a change to the final two weeks of the semester (Miriam's suggestion):
May 16: Post your final project by this date. There will be no class on this day.  During class time (and as long as it takes), please comment to one another using the same google docs system as before.           
May 23: Come to class with your project in final, product form.  Everyone will get 10 minutes with the class to discuss revisions they made and hear more feedback and comments.

2) There are 10 titles to choose from next week (only one is offered in digital format).  Please feel free to borrow one of Carmen's hardcopies but please return it next week.  The format for next week will be similar to the Spoken Soul format.  Everyone will informally present/discuss your text (feel free to use a handout/video/etc)
II. Discussion: " 'Like Signposts on the Road': The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors" by Eric D. Pritchard
PART A--- Some key frameworks of literacy for Pritchard:
  1. a set of survival techniques (p.30)
  2. remedy for negative impact of historical erasure (p.31)
  3. life-fashioning (p.32)
  4. lived experiences at the intersections of race and queerness (p.32)
  5. recovery of the marginalized epistemologies and ontologies from economies of knowledge that overlook them (p.33)
  6. ability to read a text against the popular or normative views (p.36)
  7. ability to give language to the sense of Black queer identity/authoring of one's self (p.37/p.39)
  8. support of later generations through their creation of new texts/ source of power and knowledge for future Black LGBTQ people (p.38/ p.47)
  9. critical imagination (p.39)
  10. new ways of reading social environments/ new ways of thinking the self (p.40)
  11. resistance to monolithic notions of Blackness (p.42)
PART B--- What else can we add?  What changes/revisions can we make to this list of 11 items?
III. Two Small Groups

GROUP A: Janet Mock's Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
  • What were key moments in the text for you and why?
  • How would you define a LITERACY OF REALNESS in the context of Mock's theories and positions?  (Feel free to come up with a different title than the enlarged words)

GROUP B: Mia McKenzie's Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender
  • What were key moments in the text for you and why?
  • How would you define a BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS LITERACY in the context of McKenzie's theories and positions? (Feel free to come up with a different title than the enlarged words)​​
III. Whole Class Discussion
  1. Where is our thinking now?
  2. What happens to notions of LITERACY and SCHOOL when we experience it (albeit, partially) through a BLACKQUEER lens?
IV.  Framing BlackQueerLiteracies from Joshua Allen's and Stephanie "Najma" Johnson's Locations
How does this counter or extend what we have talked about?
V. HYPE: SHEEBA (5:50pm)
Please choose one of the books for next week.

​Your question next week is simple: In your writing, be as detailed as possible in describing how this book helps build a bigger picture of African American literacies in content and/or form.  What does this text offer your colleagues (all are reading different materials) in terms of challenges, confusions, research processes, paradigms, and/or insights? 
I. Welcome Back...and Announcements
  • Feel free to look at the "#BlackLivesMatter in the Classroom" workshop that OSU graduate students will be doing at the end of the month if you are interested. The materials are located at one of the new top tabs.
  • Next week, we will all read four chapters together of Spoken Soul (1, 6, 7, 8).  Then, we will divvy up the rest of the book for a "literature circles"-styled pedagogy. Here is what we need to divide up today: Chapter 2 (writers), Chapter 3 (preachers and pray-ers), Chapter 4 (comedians and actors), Chapter 5 (singers, toasters, and rappers), Chapter 9 (education), Chapter 10 (media), Chapter 11 (“Ebonics” humor), Chapter 12 (identity).
  • Best wishes to Miriam who takes her Orals THIS FRIDAY!! 
 
II. Becoming Digital Griots: PART ONE (a writing activity)
Given the ubiquity of the "digitized academic," let's think of what it would mean to approach the digital work that is expected of academics differently. What it would mean for US to be digital griots?  What would we do? What would we create?  In classrooms?  In communities? In our scholarship?  Why?  How?
(your writing should have an implicit definition of digital griot)

III. Inkshedding Activity

IV. Discussion of Adam Banks's Digital Griots: PART TWO
  1. We will do a re-mix here of the Believing and Doubting Game.  First, find a part of the text that made you rethink a position/writing style/classroom/language ideology. Explain what Banks says and what/why you are rethinking.  Be prepared to share this aloud.
  2. Find a part of the text that you want to hear more about.  In other words, if Banks were here, what would you ask and/or say to him?  Explain that. Be prepared to share this aloud.
IV. "Funk, Flight, and Freedom” - 2015 CCCC Chair Adam Banks’ Address
What does this address add to our knowledge and discussion of Digital Griots?
V. LUANA'S HYPE: Spoken Soul
@5:55pm
I. Announcements
  • There is no class next week as Carmen will be returning from the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville
  • Please do your webpage for your hype presentation (post it for that day or as soon after as you can). Please see Carmen for any help you might need with weebly.
  • Please be prepared for your colleagues to read your homework/writing next week!  It's too, too good to keep to yourselves.
  • Can Carmen post your posters from last week to the Self-Taught webpage?
  • Please visit Jenn's website & blog soon... and leave her a note.  Click here for her site or link there from this website's homepage.  

II. Text-Rendering
  • Take (at least) a paragraph from your writing and read it aloud. Feel free to read more than that though.
                                                       OR
  • Take a paragraph (or two paragraphs) from Dr. E's book and read that aloud, explaining the significance of the words for you.

III. Open Discussion
  1. What are the central arguments that you focused on when you read African American Literacies? Why?
Iv. Partnered Discussion & Whole Class Sharing
  1. What ARE African American Literacies?  What difference does that make?
  2. How might we describe the two videos/performances AS African American literacies?  ​

V. (If Time) Spottswood Rice: Black Civil War Soldiers and African American Literacies

VI. SETH'S HYPE: Digital Griots
I. Brief Demo of the course website: FUNKDAFIED.ORG
  • We will build this as we move through the semester with your webpages/hype presentations.  See your name to the right to see your webpage!
  • Go to funkdafied.org to see the published site; login to weebly.com to edit... click PUBLISH WHEN DONE
  • Please accept the email invitation to be an administrator if you have not already

See the webpage for Self-Taught:Click Here
II. Preparations for SELF-TAUGHT Discussion
Since this book works as a historical narrative, we will start by choosing the historical moments we think most critical.  Here are our directions:
  1. Put a title on your chart paper
  2. Describe ONE historical event from Williams's book that you think is particularly critical (include the page number from the book/e-book if possible)
  3. Explain why you have chosen this historical event and its consequence/significance
  4. Please tape your poster to the wall
  5. Please know that what you write will become part of the course slideshow on the Self-Taught page

III. Gallery Walk

IV. Open Discussion

V. Case Study: Spottswood Rice

V. MARILYN'S HYPE (5:55pm)

The Hype

African American Literacies: Marilyn (click here)

Digital Griots: Seth (click here)

Spoken Soul: Luana (click here)

Black Queer Literacies: Jenn (click here)

Black Girlhood/Feminisms: Sheeba (click here)

Anna: Hip Hop Literacies (click here)

Black Masculinities: Miriam (click here)

Sara: True to the Language Game (click here)
I. Welcome to the course website: FUNKDAFIED.ORG
  • We will build this as we move through the semester with your webpages/hype presentations
  • You are encouraged to use your name on your webpage but can stay anonymous if you like
  • Look for an email invitation to be an administrator on this website in the next few days

See the webpage for Self-Taught:Click Here
II. Preparations for HYPE presentations
  • Remember that you are presenting in the last 15 minutes of class: a) plan an oral presentation/class activity; 2) design a webpage in the designated area on this website that colleagues can reference
  • Let's decide our first presenter for next week: HYPING ELAINE RICHARDSON'S AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERACIES
  • On the notecard, please indicate: 
  1. your first, second, and third choices for hype presentations
  2. your comfort level with weebly, specifically, and website work, generally (would you like a one-on-one tutorial or is a general in-class demo enough?)
  3.   If you feel like you need a one-on-one session for designing your weebly webpage, please indicate days and times you are most likely available to meet 

III. Three Small Group Discussions
GROUP A: Royster & Williams--- what parts of this history of the African American presence in Comp Studies seem important for this class?
GROUP B:  Pahl & Rowsell--- what is new literacies studies?
GROUP C: Street--- Ideological vs. autonomous models of literacy...what does that mean?  what does that matter?
As a group, talk about the things you want to say most about this piece and THEN answer the question listed above.  Choose a facilitator who will present back to the class based on the group's conversation.  We will rotate the role of facilitator throughout the semester.

IV. Carmen's Hype: The Readings of the Semester (last half hour)
  1. Take one of the handouts on the table... skim and find the one you like best
  2. Take notes on the back: what seems interesting to you here?  Why?
  3. Go-Around introducing the texts of the semester

The Hype

African American Literacies: Marilyn (click here)

Digital Griots: Seth (click here)

Spoken Soul: Luana (click here)

Black Queer Literacies: Jen (click here)

Black Girlhood/Feminisms: Sheeba (click here)

Anna: Hip Hop Literacies (click here)

Black Masculinities: Miriam (click here)

Sara: True to the Language Game (click here)