I know this is coming late, but life with Rona has been challenging. Aside from shifting from in-person to remote teaching at the University in under 72 hours, we had to re-schedule Sanctuary for 2021. Aside from the challenges of life under a pandemic, including increased social isolation, the murders of innocent Black people continues unabated and the necropolitics of migrant detention have only worsened. Poor people are hungrier and there are more people without housing. The pandemic is disproportionately killing Native, Black and Latinx peoples in poor communities. What has been a subtle, bubbling cauldron of slow death has become a quick boil.

I ran into an artist friend within the first couple of weeks of the Ronatine (quarantine under COVID-19) and I asked her how she is doing. She said, well – this is what artists do, we create art from nothing, from circumstance, from what’s around us. What she said really stuck with me. To be an artist in these times is to allow ourselves to become a clear channel for joy and pain and all of the registers of the human condition to pass through our bodies and beings and to become something new. It requires us to deepen our personal artistic discipline such that we remain grounded and ready to receive so that we can create from what we have received.

To be an artist and to be part of the gig economy means that many of my peers have lost their sources of material sustenance (income) and the spaces to realize our creative sustenance (theaters, museums, bookstores, audiences). Even so, I have seen incredible creativity among artists. Like JP Howard who has been hosting Women Writers in Bloom, online. And the curatorial project, “Art at a Time Like This.” And Gabrielle Civil, who has been hosting so many beautiful experiments in joy. Artists are doing what we have always done: try out new tools to create with what we have in front of us.

I rejoiced to see that Jo’s Pub in NYC is streaming events, and that Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is livestreaming their performances, and also sharing archival video. Theaters and galleries all over the country are figuring out how to develop avenues for artists to be able to share their work.

It made me realize that I wish this was so all the time.

I am just now coming out of the devastation of not being able to realize Sanctuary this month. In all honesty, it really hurt. But, the artists, we came together on May 20 and shared things that are sustaining us and inspiring us right now. And, that gave me life and reminded me of what I am here to do.

That same day, I finished a poem (and poem video) for the WGSS department graduation. I will post it for others after they have seen it. It felt good to feel poetry move through my body and my voice.

As I celebrate the recent launch of the collaborative Caribbean Women Healers Digital Humanities project, and upcoming publication of two academic books: Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (SUNY Press – AfroLatinx Futures Series) and Streetwalking: LGBTQ+ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers Press – Critical Caribbean Series), I also take a moment to honor that creativity is taking place within those works, too. And I appreciate that.

Today, may we all keep creating a better world for each other – even in the morass of death and destruction. Perhaps, especially so.