Earlier this year, former Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetic Document Initiative editors and CUNY students and alum Öykü Tekten (Gregory Corso), Miriam Atkin (Audre Lorde), and Marine Cornuet (Françoise Vergès) reached out to us with a novel idea. They wondered if Lost & Found Elsewhere could provide a temporary institutional homebase for their collective Pinsapo Press. They planned to publish three books over the course of 2022 and 2023 that dilated conversations begun among poets, editors, and archival researchers in the preceding years, conversations that have deepened and grown as our poetry scholarship and publishing practices have deepened and grown. The books they proposed were by Basil King, David Henderson, and Anna Gréki. While Baz and David are part of the Lost & Found family, Anna Gréki–Algerian poet of French origin–expands the circle, fulfilling our mission to more completely narrate the complicated web of people and political movements connected to New American Poetry, remapping and reinhabiting the social, cultural, and literal landscape.
New American Poetry is a designation that too-narrowly defines a wide network of international poets, artists, activists, and educators working from 1945 onwards. Linking thinkers associated with the Black Mountain School, New York School, and San Francisco Renaissance to thinkers associated with the Umbra Collective, the Black Arts Movement, the Haitian Revolution, and Algerian Liberation is one expression of the Lost & Found’s mission. Another is finding egalitarian ways to codify institutional support for radical poets, publishers, researchers, and archivists working in the expanded field of public study, outside of the institution and its disciplinary logics. Lost & Found Elsewhere’s partnership with Pinsapo Press fulfills both goals.
Lost & Found seeks to open points of access to archival research, poetry scholarship, and publication for students and general readerships alike. Because Lost & Found is as much about trying out new (and old) collaborative processes as it is about the books we publish, we are always trying to push the boundaries of how a press can operate as a flexible platform for its editors and authors to build out in ways that surface not only new strands of inquiry but also new ways of working collectively toward common aims - creativity, mutuality, solidarity.
Lost & Found is honored to provide an institutional homebase for Pinsapo Press, a publishing endeavor led by one alum and two current CUNY graduate students, during 2022-2023. This partnership models the ways in which humanities infrastructure at public universities might work more cooperatively with intra and extramural actors to help produce and promote their work for the long-duree, field-building and door-opening along the way. Look out for new and archival books from David Henderson, and Anna Gréki, and learn more about our first book by the great Black Mountain painter and poet Basil King below.
Read more about the first co-publication between Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found Elsewhere There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits by Basil King, introduced by Ammiel Alcalay, and edited with an afterword by Öykü Tekten.
Watch the video recording of Basil King's book launch reading:
