8 March 2021 Dear Everyone: Here we are, facing the anniversary of the transition to remote mode. I’ve been trying to figure out what or how I feel about this — really, whether I have feelings about it that are distinct or distinguishable from the general muddle. Maybe unexpectedly, I find I’m mostly annoyed! — by… Read More

1 March 2021 Dear Everyone: My first note of this message is an offering of thanks to Sonali Perera for organizing this past Friday’s event, “Where is the Indian in Aztlá​n?”, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s rich and incisive lecture, with brilliant response by Chandan Reddy.  By urging us to consider the exigences for and meaningfulness of… Read More

22 February 2021 Dear Everyone: This weekend felt absurdly short! Like it just began and then poof, it was gone!  I know for some – maybe many? – people who work in higher ed, weekends and weekdays are meaningless insofar as the kind of work we do doesn’t readily stay contained to regular business hours.… Read More

16 February 2021 Dear Everyone:   Maybe especially because it’s been so cold and icy around here, and most certainly because we’ve been in this hunkered down stage now for nearly a year, Friday’s Queer Valentines forum was an enormously welcome hit of warmth and light — thank you once again to Madeleine Barnes for… Read More

8 February 2021 Dear Everyone: I hope you’re able to join the celebration of queer love and live on Friday!  Big thanks to Madeleine Barnes and Olivia Wood for hosting this upcoming Friday Forum! It is also a rather perfect way of welcoming the year of the ox!  Friday is the Lunar New Year! As… Read More

1 February 2021 Dear Everyone: I’m watching the snow coming down hard as I write this – where I am in northern NJ, we’ve got about six inches already. I’m so sorry we aren’t having a proper snow day, with classes canceled and all (virtual classes and work continues today, per the institutional message we… Read More

25 January 2021 Dear Everyone: I’m a near fervent admirer of Yoko Ono, not least because of Grapefruit, first published in 1964 and comprised of a series of “scores” – prompts, directions, guides, suggestions. As much as anything else, it’s a regular source of pedagogical inspiration for me. Recently, though, and perhaps especially through this… Read More

31 December 2020 Dear Everyone: There’s some part of me that knows it’s not quite right only to think of beginnings as marked by the official chronologies that give us new year’s days of various sorts, and there’s a bigger part of me that welcomes the regulated reminder to reset and stand in stillness to/and… Read More

7 December 2020 Dear Everyone: At last Friday’s final Friday Forum Open Executive Committee meeting, I shared a poem by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, “It’s Kinda Cold Out Here” written in the aftermath of José Esteban Muñoz’s death, the seventh anniversary of which was last week. The poem is comprised of pieces of text and email… Read More

30 November 2020 Dear Everyone: Almost! Almost to the end of term, to the close of 2020, to the start of new reading and writing and rhythms! I know “almost” can be excruciating and nestles perhaps too unnervingly closely with the big deferrals — of justice and equity and cherished life in robust forms —… Read More