Floating Freely: Queer Archives & Media from the Elders Project

What can we learn from listening to our queer Black elders?

Join us at Weeksville Heritage Center for Floating Freely: Queer Archives & Media from the Elders Project, a half-day celebration of Black and queer history including a film screening, workshops, music, food trucks, and a panel exploring the questions of freedom, inheritance, and belonging.

Floating Freely is inspired by interviews conducted by J Wortham for the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project, which captured 230+ oral histories with minoritized elders across America. Wortham’s collection dives into queer waterfront histories in and around New York City. The Elders Project was created by award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson and produced in partnership with Incite Institute.

This event is free and open to the public, and will coincide with Weeksville Green Farmers & Community Market, our annual farmer’s market focusing on Black foodways, urban growing, diasporic memory, and community built through food at every stage.

EVENT SCHEDULE

12pm

Live art performance by Osadolor alongside a screening of a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi

1:25pm – 2:25pm

Choose your own path with a workshop:

• Black Poetry and The Wish: Imagining Otherwise and its Otherworlds (Led by Michelle Alexander)- Black poetry that deploys, incites, drifts into, or stirs up wish-making or its antithetical bearing, dread, offers us a subtle mode of critical engagement and radical reimagining of the time when the wish finds language. Of what could be. Of what can be. We will ask and look toward: Who or what can figure as the realization of a wish? How is wish concerned with the future? “Black Poetry and The Wish: Imagining Otherwise and its Otherworlds” will utilize listening, reading, and generative exercises to delve into the potential of the wish. Bring your creativity to writing the wish.
• Mixing and Remixing: The Poetics of Collaging the Archive (Led by Kenia Hale)- Throughout this intergenerational hands-on session, we’ll work together to make collages and poems using materials from the Elders Project, collectively activating the archive and exploring the ways that our communities mix and remix our archival methods, creating intergenerational conversation and pass through. Think a quilting b – but with collaging!
• Reunion in Ink: A Letter Writing Workshop (Led by Nyssa Chow)- This isn’t just about putting pen to paper; it’s about reclaiming parts of yourself, honoring those who walk with you, and acknowledging the wisdom you carry. Borrowing from oral history, a listening practice that attends to the subtle ways that we make meaning with and alongside our worlds, we will engage an approach that invites us to listen for our embodied knowledge, both inherited and born. What do you feel a duty to remember? Who needs to hold this knowledge? What memories do you belong to, and what belongs to you? Who holds an imagination for your dignity? Through guided prompts and shared reflection, we’ll treat re-membering as medicine, recognizing the power of gathering and languaging. What ways of seeing, knowing, and relating are worlded in you? This generative writing practice invites us to slow down, listen, and allow that awareness to carry us a distance, and notice where we go. Who will you speak to? Who speaks with you?

3:30pm – 4:30pm

Intergenerational Conversation

A conversation moderated by Ellery Washington in conversation with poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor and activist and educator Afua Kafi Akua reflecting on aging, memory, and identity.

4:30pm – 5:30pm 

Live sonic interpretations of Waterfront Queer Stories: Elders’ Resilience Amidst Changing Tides featuring 20-minute performances by STEMLINES, Kambaba Jasper, and Viper.

FEATURED ARTIST & SPEAKERS

Afua Kafi-Akua 

Afua Kafi-Akua was born in the Bronx and is now retired, but works as a Media and Communications professor at NYC College of Technology. She is an artist of multiple mediums like writing, media, photography, and is interested in socially relevant and personal themes such as being the grandchild of immigrants, LGBTQ+ issues & gender identification.

Ellery Washington 

Ellery Washington is a New York-based writer from Albuquerque, NM, whose first novel, Buffalo, fall 2022, returns him to his Southwestern roots. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, State by State ‘A Panoramic Portrait of America,’ and Geography of Rage ‘Remembering the Los Angeles Riots’. His screen work includes projects with Disney, Pixar, Tristar, and Paramount Pictures. He’s currently an Associate Professor of Writing at the Pratt Institute.

Cheryl Boyce Taylor 

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is an immigrant poet, teaching artist, and curator. Born in Trinidad and raised in Queens, New York, she is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her most recent, The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022.), published by Haymarket Books, in 2023 was the winner of  the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry.

In addition to her poetry collections, in 2021 Cheryl’s verse memoir, Mama Phife Represents, was published, winning The Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for that year.  It is about her son, Malik Taylor, aka Hip Hop Legend, Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest. In 2022 her collection of poetry, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, was nominated for the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry.

Boyce-Taylor has been awarded The Barnes & Nobel Writers for Writers Award and was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times Book Review, and The Chicago Review of Books. She earned an MFA in poetry from Stonecoast/The University of Southern Maine and a Masters in Social Work from Fordham University. Cheryl’s works are archived at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Osadolor

Osadolor Osawemwenze is a New York-based director, visual maker, creative researcher, and sound designer born and raised in Dallas, Texas. He graduated from Stanford University with an academic focus on the Black Diaspora, pop culture, Blackqueerness, media, art, and aesthetics. As a Nigerian American, moments of discovery, reflection, and awareness of their positioning in this world influence her nostalgic Lo-Fi and D-I-Y videos and experimental sonic design. In his globally charting podcast, “a coming of age, but irl,” Osadolor blurs introspection and conversation through uniquely crafted sonic experiences. Osadolor’s latest experimental documentary,  a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi, which delves into the nuance of today’s Black queer youth, was a Best Documentary (International Short Film) finalist at the 2024 London Breeze Film Festival and has since been screened in various film festivals and theatres.

STEMLINES

STEMLINES is the endless quest of Nnenna Udumah to explore the limitless world of music with a focus on electronic production and performance. Her music is marked by hypnotic drums, melodic R&B-inspired vocals, and expansive storytelling that allows her to elude the confines of genre. Through her music, she investigates the vast emotional landscape of human existence while feeding her insatiable desire for experimentation and discovery.

Kambaba Jasper

Akin to the greatest of poets, Kambaba Jasper is an examiner of the uncanny: that which opens amidst and ruptures our sense of the mundane. Beneath the magnifying glass of experimental electronic music, the Fayetteville North Carolina musician holds, distends, and recaptures the profoundly strange and spiritual content of folk, R&B, and gospel music. The result is a sound that pierces like a spicule of ice: startling the senses upon entry and melting, subsumed by organs, soon after.

Viper

Viper is a boundary-blurring artist whose sets live at the crossroads of sensuality and sound. Blending afro house, deep house, alternative R&B, spoken word, and cinematic scoring, Viper curates’ immersive sonic journeys that move the body and stir the soul. Whether crafting warm, meditative soundscapes with original compositions or igniting the dancefloor with an exhilarating DJ set, Viper’s performances are deeply intentional—designed to seduce, soothe, and awaken. With a signature moody style and a pulse on the emotional undercurrent of every track, Viper transforms each showcase into a space for connection, feeling, and release.

WORKSHOP FACILITATORS 

Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet, creative nonfiction writer, and interdisciplinary practitioner. She graduated from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, receiving the Herbert Rubin Prize in Poetry, and holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her poetry collection, A Stone’s Throw from C r a y,  is forthcoming from New American Press as the recipient of the New American Prize (Poetry). Among her publications are works that have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Oxford Poetry, Third Coast, Epiphany, and Puerto del Sol. She has served as a poet in residence for the Chicago Poetry Center and as a Visiting Teaching Artist for the Poetry Foundation’s “Forms and Features” series. She is an Interdisciplinary Humanities Instructor at the Odyssey Project. She is the recipient of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize 2024 and is a co-founder + Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine.

Kenia Hale

Kenia Hale (she/her/ella) is a writer, researcher, and collage artist from Cleveland, Ohio. A granddaughter of the Great Migration, Kenia studied Computer Science and Architecture at Yale University and produced research about liberatory technologies, digital marronage, and critical technology ecologies at the Princeton University Ida B. Wells Data Justice Lab. Currently, Kenia works as Public Projects Coordinator for the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Project at the Columbia University Incite Institute. Kenia has taught speculative fiction writing at The Octavia Project and The School of Poetic Computation, and is a founding editor of Porch Water Press (porchwaterpress.com). Kenia is passionate about creating accessible public knowledge and honoring and preserving the myriad ways of knowing that sustain her community and others.

Nyssa Chow 

This workshop will be facilitated by Nyssa Chow, oral historian, writer, and artist. She is the Interim Director of the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University, is a Visiting Scholar of experimental pedagogies at Princeton University, and co-founded the DocX Fellowship, a liberatory oasis for black and brown documentary artists at Duke University. Her multimedia project, The Story of Her Skin, received the PEN America Foundation’s Jean Stein Award for literary oral history. Trace: A Memorial, a permanent monument in the CUNY School of Public Health, honors essential workers lost to COVID-19 and earned special recognition from the U.S. Congress and the New York State Senate. Chow lectures and facilitates workshops widely on oral history as “spontaneous literature,” a relational approach that positions oral history as a decolonial practice in intimate space.About the Elders Project Established by award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson, the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project captures and celebrates untold and underrepresented stories of activists, storytellers, and community builders who have witnessed and shaped great change in American public life. Spanning over 230 oral history interviews and 1,000 personal mementos, the Elders Project was produced by Incite Institute at Columbia University—home to the Columbia Center for Oral History Research—in partnership with Woodson’s nonprofit, Baldwin for the Arts, between 2022 and 2024.Learn more.