Join us for a book launch and celebration on Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 6 pm to honor Karen Jaime’s pathbreaking scholarship and reflect on the history of the New York institution that is the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Dr. Patricia Herrera and Dr. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé will speak to the significance of Jaime’s book for the fields of Latinx Studies and Performance Studies, and for the legacy of the Cafe. Artists Regie Cabico, Emanuel Xavier, and Andrés Chulisi Rodríguez will perform poems and reflect on their relationship to the Cafe as queer performers.
The book launch inaugurates the Hemispheric Institutes 2022 event series "Queering the Nuyorican and Archiving its Legacy." This series will mark the publication of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive in the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), which Dr. Jaime was instrumental in acquiring and curating.
Dr. Karen Jaime is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. She is a former Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow, and Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021) argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Her critical writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, emisférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, ASAP/J, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Performance Matters. She is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). As a published poet, her writing is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21st Century USA. During her residency, she will lead Institute programming on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Collection in HIDVL and present new research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Cafe community.
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