Series VII

Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, Lost & Found Series VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between New York based poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar. As Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies in the late 1960s and 1970s, while Blackburn brought another world into American English through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes’s vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational reform, completes a multifaceted picture of radical vision that all the writers in this Series enact.