“The biggest thing is just the scope of it—and to realize that hundreds and hundreds of people are working on this thing that started out just in your head,” Quinn said, addressing more than 100 members of the Fordham community over Zoom.  

‘A Once-in-a-Lifetime Thing’: Stories From the Bridgerton Set 

Quinn recalled the journey from landing a contract with Shondaland Media, the company behind award-winning series Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, to watching her romance novels become a television series. 

“It started with sitting in a Starbucks, drinking coffee, and getting a phone call and practically falling off my stool,” Quinn said. “[But] it was a very slow process. I thought publishing was slow, but adapting a book is glacial. From the very first phone call to the time the show actually appeared on Netflix was four years.” 

In those four years, Quinn served as a consultant for the TV series. She read the scripts before they went into production, but her involvement was limited. Quinn relinquished creative control on the project—and for a good reason. 

“I did not want to do anything to jeopardize this. This was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me,” said Quinn. She also knew her work was in good hands: “One of the smartest things that you can do is recognize other smart people. And I was not going to tell Shonda Rhimes how to make television.” 

Quinn said she loved the results, especially the color-blind casting and the diverse storytelling from the scriptwriters. 

“There were somewhere between 15 to 20 writers working on the project, and that group of people was incredibly diverse—not just race, but gender, sexual orientation, religion … they all can bring life experiences and imagination to the story that I can’t,” said Quinn. “One of the main things about a romance novel is the way it makes the reader feel and the happiness that you get at the end … I love that Bridgerton the television show has managed to create something where more people can see themselves in the story and see themselves getting the happy ending.” 

Quinn’s lips are sealed on the show’s second season, which will begin filming this spring. But she showed her audience an iPhone photo of her and Regé-Jean Page, who plays a leading character on Bridgerton, from a season one filming location. 

“Regé-Jean Page is absolutely as handsome as you think,” she said, while a few students gasped from their screens and typed their reactions in the chat box, including “JEALOUS” and “Love Love Love!!!!” 

Tips on the Creative Writing Process 

Two students from Fordham College at Lincoln Center, senior English major Mary Alter and junior art history major Sophie Choo, asked Quinn questions about her creative writing process and background, while several other students typed questions in the Zoom chat box. 

“All of your characters are very well developed. Any tips for developing characters and making their backstories?” wrote one student, Madeline Lanni.

Quinn advised her to think deeply about her characters’ backstories before beginning to write a novel—something she started to do while writing The Duke and I, the first novel in the Bridgerton book series. 

“I ended up understanding these characters so much more. Since then, I have adopted this in my prewriting. I’ll spend several pages talking about who these people are … because we are all shaped by our experiences. Does this person have brothers and sisters? Are they the oldest? Are they in the middle?” Quinn said. “Many of [these details]never show up in the book. But it means that somehow, in some amorphous, creative way, I know the character better. And I think that comes through.” 

‘Believe in What You Do’

Another student, Vivienne Blouin, asked Quinn how writers, especially young women, can defend the merit of their work genre—particularly in romance—against condescending peers.

Quinn recalled a quote from Nancy Pearl, a famous American librarian. 

“She said once that literary fiction is always judged by the best example of it, and romance is always judged by the worst. And it’s so true,” Quinn said. “I think you just have to stick to your guns and believe in what you do.” 

Mary Bly, Ph.D., chair of the English department, said Quinn offered some valuable advice and analysis. 

“Julia Quinn gave us a fascinating, authentic look at the life of a bestselling author, now propelled into the forefront of American pop culture by the Netflix series. It’s important for students to meet people at the top of their profession, if only to see that they are merely people. Julia offered great advice about writing, as well as explaining the process by which a book is optioned. Her discussion of consent in the first Bridgerton book—the fact that what is now seen as the hero’s lack of consent was greeted at the time by readers as the heroine’s feminist triumph—is also significant as a counter-weight to judgement of the past,” said Bly, who writes fiction and romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James. 

“Perhaps equally importantly, she confessed that she had no real idea why she chose her major [art history at Harvard College]. That was perhaps the most inspiring of all. My takeaway: learn how to write, and you can do anything with your degree.”

For the past five years, Fordham’s creative writing program has hosted the Golden Gloves Literary Competition, an annual event where creative writing classes from the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses present their literary pieces and compete for prizes. But this school year, with a new name, the event struck a different tone. 

“We wanted creative writing to act as an opportunity for community building as opposed to competition … We wanted all our classes’ stories to be celebrated in equal measure,” Sarah Gambito, an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Fordham, explained in an email. 

On Dec. 6, nearly 150 students and faculty members gathered in Lowenstein’s 12th-floor lounge to retell the stories they had written this past semester. 

The event began with a story from Fordham’s second Writer at Risk in Residence: Felix Kaputu, Ph.D., a scholar from the Democratic Republic of Congo who arrived at Fordham this past October through a collaboration that gives writers a “free, safe place to live, work, and write without the threat of violence from their home countries” for two years, according to the program’s description.

Kaputu spoke about life in his native Congo, from the political environment to how his father and uncle shaped his identity as a storyteller. In 2006, Kaputu was falsely accused of participating in anti-government activities and jailed in solitary confinement. 

Below is an excerpt from Kaputu’s piece shared at the Story Circle: 

“My father, who was working as the catechist for the Catholic Mission, had an extraordinary talent as a storyteller of a particular kind. However, he would not use his talent for tales, legends, epics, and other oral narratives that had well-known narrators. They produced their stories in royal courts with a big group of musicians and drumbeaters. My father had the talent to make, keep the suspense, and talk about his personal life, and encounters. His stories included running from both the local and neighboring countries’ police. A famous story was about fighting a lion from a hut where he was hiding from the police. Another narrative was about moving from Congo to neighboring countries using a bicycle to celebrate life with the locals sharing the same culture. However, he would run back to the Congo whenever the locals would find him too much seductive of their women. He had more stories of that kind.  Then, my uncle, a professional hunter, had a significant influence on me. I lived with him a couple of times during school vacations. He shared with me traditional knowledge and curing diseases with medicinal plants. He taught me how to interview community leaders and wander in the forest at night without being lost.

That background has made me strong over the years. I learned to resist when condemned for prison without reason, and I easily travel around the world as a scholar and writer at risk without remorse.”

This semester, Kaputu taught a creative writing class at Fordham. 

“It means a lot to me,” Kaputu said. “One of the most important things I like in my life …  is [teaching]. There is nothing else in the world, I think, I like [more than]  being in class with students … They learn from me, I learn from them.”

Eight students also presented work from their creative writing classes. They took turns and sat in pairs, facing each other. Surrounding them were their classmates and mentors, along with flower petals and yellow candles on the carpeted floor. For more than an hour, students retold personal experiences from their lives. After each student spoke, the next speaker gave them a wish relating to their story, like “I hope that you are always surrounded by the ones that you love,” said Gambito.

Among the student speakers was Patrick Raneses, a senior English major and theology/creative writing minor at Fordham College at Rose Hill, who read a piece he wrote about his grandfather for Luminous Details, a graduate-level creative writing course. 

Below is an excerpt from Raneses’s piece, “Some memories”: 

“I remember when I was back home one summer and you and I were sitting on the ugly orange couches in my living room. Mom wanted you to visit, because you were getting stupid old. We were sitting there, silent. You were penning a letter while I was flicking through something on my phone.

Unprompted, you turned to me and started telling me this story about when you were in the Philippine Army during World War II, you were a cook and you weren’t much younger than I was. And when you were carrying a tray of food from one barrack to another, a Japanese soldier rushed you and buried his bayonet into your gut. 

You lifted your shirt and started laughing: I stared at the striated patterns of flesh that was your marbled torso and I tried looking for the scar. I think I saw it there in the folds. I smiled, saying that was amazing, because I thought it was at the time, even though that’s a strange way to describe a thing like that. You giggled, too, and stared at me with your giggling eyes.

Then you turned back to write your letter. About ten minutes later, you started telling me when you were in the Philippine Army during World War II, you weren’t much younger than I, a man gutted you. I told you that was amazing, again. You looked at me, again, with your giggling eyes, and you told me, dementia is like hell.”

Raneses said he realized he was a writer in the first creative writing class he took at Fordham, nearly a year ago. 

“I really identity myself as a writer, in the same way that I am an Asian American,” Raneses said. “I am a writer because I have to write. It’s like a release valve. It’s therapeutic in a lot of ways … It forces me to challenge myself, whether that means confronting certain truths or hard things.” 

Camille Hermida-Fuentes, a junior English major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, wrote about her grandmother Alicia—the “unluckiest” person she said she knows. 

Below is an excerpt from Hermida-Fuentes’ piece, “Carcassonne”:

“Alicia had really, really bad luck. In 1985, she was at an art museum in D.C., with her son and daughter. Her son said, “Alicia, look at this painting”, so she turned around and then she was collapsing, and then she was waking up in a hospital and they were telling her it was cancer. Multiple myeloma. The kind that clings to your bone marrow for its life. The kind that doesn’t go away. And it didn’t. For 27 years, it didn’t go away. Doctors said it was a miracle but there was nothing miraculous about her life, about how she was always collapsing. Once, she tripped over her own feet on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night and caught pneumonia because of the angle her broken shoulder bones forced her to stay in, pushed liquid into her lungs.”

For Hermida-Fuentes, a self-described “shy” person, storytelling helps her to convey her emotions. 

“I truly love telling stories … I feel like when I write, I’m finally getting to say what I want to say,” she said. “And there’s something really cool about being able to create your own kind of world when you write.”

She said the Story Circle—her first-ever public reading of work—was also an opportunity for healing.

“This is a story I’ve been having a hard time telling. There’s a lot of complicated feelings and guilt,” Hermida-Fuentes said. “It was very healing to have everyone that I know from class there to support me.” 

These words, taken from the poem “Thunderdome” in Sarah Gambito’s new book Loves You, evoke the kind of nourishment the poet hopes readers will find in her work.

In 96 pages of poems, Gambito, an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Fordham, presents a gamut of personal life experiences: how Filipino Americans—and people of color—are assailed and fetishized; the struggle to hold on to cultural identity as an American-born child of immigrants; the nuances of everyday life; and what it’s like to be the mother of a biracial child. But her book has a tasty twist.

Loves You is part poetry, part cookbook. Her poems are divided among five flavors: umami, sour, salty, bitter, and sweet. Most of them reference food in some shape or form. (Example: “When God was Filipino, / he put a pig and fire together and called it porkissimo.”) And her poems give readers a taste of not only her life but also her actual cooking. There are recipes for family favorites—salmon sinigang, barbecue scepters, watermelon agua fresca—scattered throughout the book.

Her ultimate goal? To nurture strangers with her words—to make people feel, she says, even if they are occasionally puzzled by her poems, published by Persea Books on Jan. 22.

“I want people to feel nourished. I want people to feel provoked. I want people to feel … a little freaked out,” she said, laughing a little. “I don’t see it as sort of just a sweet book. There’s anger here, as well. But I think anger can hold equal footing with joy and creation, and with thinking about community and family.”

In her poem “Don’t Eat Filipinos!” Gambito speaks about the subtle symbolism of a biscuit called Filipinos. The controversial cookie is sold in Spain—a country that controlled the Philippines for years.

“To name it after a people, a country that was colonized for 400 years … I really thought it was a joke,” she said. “Literally, it’s like you have Spanish people eating Filipinos.”

As an antidote, the page after that poem lists her husband’s recipe for lychee macarons.

“The epigraph is instead of eating Filipinos, eat these,” Gambito said. “The idea is to be thoughtful about what we’re doing, what we’re putting into our bodies—what it means.”

Gambito’s new poetry book also melds meals with motherhood. Her poem “Hapa,” defined as a person who is partially Asian or Pacific Islander, is about her 8-year-old son. He was born with blonde hair and blue eyes—a stark difference from his Filipina mother. Strangers would mistake Gambito for his nanny. She felt like they were “othering” her from her own child, she said. “Orangutan nanny in the garage / my pleasure—a disappointment,” she wrote in “Hapa.”

Gambito mentions a more universal aspect of motherhood—the joys and fears of being a mother. In the poem “First Born,” she writes, “Basically: my wish is that you are never, never pierced through the heart. / My aim is ordinary. / My anthem open. My berries gasping together in pie.”

Those last six words describe the feeling of being breathless, she said. “You want to provide. You want to give your son beautiful, sweet things, and you feel like always short to the task.”

Loves You is Gambito’s third published collection of poetry. This book was 10 years in the making, she said. But back in the book’s infancy, she recalls sitting at a ramen shop with a friend, pondering over the purpose of her new poetry collection.

“What do you think poetry should do?” her friend asked.

“It should do this,” Gambito said, cradling her warm bowl of broth with her hands. “It should nourish you from the inside out.”

Text of Gambito’s poem “Holiday” in Loves You:

Crashing across cousin stars with deep listening holes. Because we’re

related and every wren that has nested abroad would like to become

my mother. I’d like to lie flayed open upon her twelve breaking torsos.

This blood would weld us to the chair and I’d let a crowd in. I’d always

thought that crowds were created in a panic. A great anti-system of

people fleeing fire. Rather crowd dynamic is cultivated because you

run towards. You want concert tickets or something to do the day after

thanksgiving. They’re almost giving it away. This is what she says as

the gold metal hits the outline of her. She says I want you to find me. I

want that you never give up and you find me.

It all began with a professor named Sarah Gambito, an award-winning poet and director of Fordham’s creative writing program. She had heard about Yale’s most popular class of all time—Psychology and the Good Life, a college course designed to teach students how to have a happier life. She thought it was something she could bring to Fordham.

But Gambito’s class, titled The Good Life, has a different take on happiness. Through twice-weekly lectures, Gambito taught 16 students how creative writing can spark a deeper sense of personal well-being—and vice versa.

“The point is how can creative writing help usher us into a greater—a better—sense of living?” Gambito said. “It’s been said that a good life is a creative life.”

Yoga, Succulents, and Adventures in the Bronx

At the beginning of the semester, Gambito gifted each student with a small green succulent. Over the next few months, the students fed and watered their succulents, took notes about their development, and watched their plant babies grow.

“Taking care of yourself is like taking care of a plant,” she explained. “You have to nurture yourself.”

In the classroom, they took a meditative approach toward the creative writing process, drawing on the four main goals of life in the Hindu religion: dharma (truth), kama (joy), artha (prosperity), and moksha (liberation). For one class session, they gathered at the McGinley Center for an afternoon of yoga, contemplation, and freewriting about their meditation experience. After a few rounds of yoga, they draped Korean white sheet masks across their faces, lay on mats and towels, and listened to a soothing, instrumental music playlist on Spotify. The idea was to quiet their bodies and listen to that small, still voice deep inside, said Gambito—a voice that’s often eclipsed by the noise of our everyday responsibilities.

Their expeditions also extended beyond the campus. Gambito sent them on a scavenger hunt through the New York Botanical Garden, where they free wrote about the flora and fauna. Another day, they visited Egidio Pastry Shop, a mom-and-pop store a few blocks from the Rose Hill campus, and reflected on their dining experience via Google reviews.

“Part of what it means to be a creative writer is to get out of the classroom and to be involved with your community,” Gambito explained.

Storytelling Over A Shared Meal

On their last day of class in Keating Hall, Gambito and her students shared a potluck supper.

Their classroom windowsill was laden with goodies baked or bought by students: vegan monkey bread, mini pizza bagels, empanadas. Gambito herself bought five pies from Bella’s Pizza, the place with “the best pizza in the Bronx,” she declared to the class—according to Google, that is.

As they ate, the students spoke about experiences that helped them become better creative writers or thinkers. Some brought meaningful objects: a drawing from a student’s favorite book, pencils tagged with poems on small slips of paper, homemade Irish soda bread, a student’s first published story for a Fordham student journal.

Then there was Fia Swanson, FCRH ’21, who brought in her most valuable piece of jewelry—a simple pair of bronze-colored, chandelier-style earrings. She asked her peers to guess who gave them to her.

“In popcorn style, yell out your first guess,” she said.

“Mother.” “Grandparent.” “Boyfriend.” “Best friend.” “Godmother.”

“Yourself!” someone said, as people laughed.

“Actually, my therapist gave me these,” Swanson answered.

In her senior year of high school, Swanson’s father contacted a therapist for her named Dr. P. She didn’t have time for any more clients. So without telling his daughter, he sent Dr. P something that Swanson had written: a personal essay about her identity, being biracial, and her childhood.

“She read it, and said, ‘I read what you wrote, and I just had to meet you,’” Swanson recalled. “I couldn’t believe it was my writing that would get me the therapy that changed my life.”

On the day of her last session with Dr. P, Swanson’s face was covered in tears.

“She hugged me that day, and I broke down crying like I never had before,” Swanson said. “When my father came to pick me up, she jokingly said to him, ‘She’s gonna write my book for me someday.’”

The last presenter, Haris Basic, FCRH ’21, recalled memories with his best friends of nine years, like watching a zombie movie together at one in the morning and reminiscing about their high school days during a six-hour car drive to Buffalo, New York.

“I wish they were here to hear you talk about that,” said a student. “Because it was just so beautiful.”

“They would roast me,” Basic said, as the rest of the class erupted into laughter.

As he finished his presentation and the class began to applaud, he suddenly broke in.

“Wait, wait … I wanted to thank you all and Professor Gambito for being people who have inspired me to explore my creative side through writing,” he said. “Thank you all for being open and accepting.”  

Finding Community Among Writers

In the final minutes of their last class, Gambito’s students reflected on what they’ve learned. Through workshopping each other’s work, the students say they learned that writing a good piece is a group effort. But perhaps most importantly, the course has shown them the importance of caring for both their mind and body. By becoming more in touch with their emotions and their body, the students say they have developed a crucial skill for good writing—being more vulnerable in the stories they write.

“The greatest text you can think about is the text of your life. And for you to be an author of that, for you to feel agency and empowerment [is very important],” Gambito said. “Sometimes that’s easy to forget—that you are the architect of the stories that you’re able to tell.”

The Good Life will be taught again next fall.

As the years went by, violence became an everyday occurrence.

“When you left the house to go to the market, you were lucky to return home alive,” said Ugbabe, Ph.D., a South Asian writer and English professor from the University of Jos. “Because on the following day, that open market where you’d shopped was bombed.”

Ugbabe, the newest faculty addition to Fordham’s English department, has lived in Jos for more than 35 years with her Nigerian husband and children. She said the violent clashes between indigenous Christian and Muslim Hausa communities in the central Plateau State escalated in the last 15 years—from arson and machete attacks to suicide bombings in churches, mosques, and public spaces. These incidents not only contributed to displacement, but also led to more than 3,000 deaths in the region, according to Human Rights Watch.

Then, tragedy hit closer to home.

Writing from a conflict zone

In 2007, a colleague of Ugbabe’s, a professor went missing on his way home from an event, while another colleague’s daughter was killed in a bomb explosion. Soon, her neighbor’s home, which was abandoned during the crisis, was set on fire. As foreigners became the latest targets of kidnapping, Ugbabe, who was born and raised in Chennai, India, faced an even greater risk. In the fall of 2015, her family experienced an armed home intrusion that completely shattered her sense of security.

“It was a very stressful way of living,” she said. “My risk was personal to me but also related to the ethno-religious environment we lived in. It was no less disruptive or devastating than political risk.”

In partnership with PEN America, Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), Westbeth Artists Housing, ArtistsSafety.net, and Residency Unlimited, the creative writing program at Fordham offered Ugbabe a newly created position as a Writer at Risk in Residence. The role comes months after she completed a 2016-2017 fellowship in the women, gender, and sexuality department of Harvard University.

The yearlong pilot position will allow Ugbabe, an active member of the Association of Nigerian Authors, to advance her academic work. As the department’s Writer at Risk, Ugbabe will also teach a new writer’s workshop at the Rose Hill campus, called Creating Dangerously: Writing from Conflict Zones.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., chair of the English department, said the class will explore injustice and oppression through the works of writers Ken Saro-Wiwa, Edwidge Danticat, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and others.

“By initiating this pilot position, the English department shows how the study and writing of literature can help social justice goals in a global context,” he said.

Insider-outsider perspective

Ugbabe said that taking a temporary hiatus from the sectarian conflicts in Jos has inspired her to do some soul-searching. Having lived in Australia and Scotland as an academic before settling in Jos, the scholar said she has had to confront issues concerning her multiple identities.

“There is that layering of a European perspective somewhere with a deep Indian sensibility and consciousness, but I’m also looking at the world through Nigerian eyes,” said Ugbabe, who received a doctorate in literature from Flinders University of South Australia and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Madras in India.

This insider-outsider perspective is reflected in Soulmates (Penguin Books, 2011), Ugbabe’s first book of short stories. “Exile,” one of her favorite short stories in the book, also has a protagonist who is accepted into a community but also feels alienated from it.

“It’s like you’re walking on a tightrope and you have to maintain your balance,”  said Ugbabe.

In many of her stories, she sets readers on a path of introspection with narratives that are focused on estrangement, domestic life, and the meaning of home.

“These stories are like fleeting moments that you see from a train window, and that’s how I present them in my writing,” she said.

When Ugbabe looks back at her experience in Jos, she is reminded of the challenges of other creative artists around the world who are facing similar environmental constraints.

“I can only speak from my own experience, but I found that it is almost a strategy for survival to write when you’re in a conflict zone,” she said. “You are writing [so that]the world is going to know about it, and this story needs to be told.”

Now Kundiman, a nonprofit dedicated to the development of Asian-American literature, has signed a three-year agreement with Fordham College at Rose Hill that will bring internships, a course on The Writer’s Life, and more student-centered programming to campus.

Kundiman will arrange for six visits per year by Asian-American writers to share work, speak on Asian-American literature, and various aspects of literary nonprofit management. They will also develop a course on Asian-American literature in collaboration with the English department. The Writer’s Life course will help students learn about literary nonprofits, career, and funding opportunities for writers, as well as introduce students to the “wide ecology of literary culture in New York.”

Nine internship opportunities will also be developed that will allow students to receive hands-on instruction in communications, development, programs, editing and research. Kundiman will also host an annual community–based social justice project that will actively involve Fordham students.

Kundiman was co-founded by Sarah Gambito, associate professor of English at Fordham and director of creative writing.

“This partnership enhances the University’s reputation as a key participant in the vibrant New York literary scene and as a stronghold for multicultural cosmopolitanism and Asian-American letters,” Gambito said.

The University has also agreed to continue to host the annual five-day conference.

The retreat, which brings nationally renowned Asian-American poets to campus, provides a safe and instructive environment to address the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian-American writers. Kundiman fellows have published work in The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and Poetry.

Since its inception in 2004, the annual poetry retreat has provided more than 200 emerging poets with a distinguished faculty and writing environment. Its public readings have brought the work of emerging and established Asian-American poets and writers to new audiences.

Related Articles:

Fordham Joins Kundiman to Bring Poets to Campus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BszUuKClT0U

“When God was Filipino, / he put a pig and fire together and called it porkissimo.”

The line—an excerpt from the poem “I Am Not From The Philippines”—was written by Sarah Gambito, an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program.

It was, to her knowledge, the first time her work had been used in a restaurant review, though it was not the first time food had infiltrated her poetry and prose.

“I remember having a very delicious bowl of ramen with a friend, and saying, ‘What if a poem could be like this bowl of ramen on a cold, cold day? You know, carbs and broth and complete comfort,” she said.

“I’m interested in the idea of how that can happen in words.”

The theme of hunger comes up a lot in her work because she writes often about the immigrant experience. Her parents emigrated from the Philippines to the United States, and she grew up in Virginia, before moving to New York in 1995. Because she never lived in the Philippines and left Virginia so long ago, the concept of home is very much on her mind, she said.

A trip to the Philippines in 1999 on a faculty fellowship—her first as an adult to the country of her ancestors— made her realize she has many homes.

“The idea of feeling at home in multiple places is a different kind grace that I didn’t realize I’d have access to either,” she said.

“Much of my writing has been about the anguish of feeling displaced and the anger around that. I’m ready to also look at the other side of it, because I may not have a capital “H” home, but I have these lower case “h” homes in many places that I look.”

Having already published two collections of poetry, Matadora (Alice James Books, 2004) and Delivered (Persea Books, 2009), Gambito is currently at work on a new one, tentatively titled Virginia. It’s still unclear what form it will take, she said, but chances are that food will play a factor.

“There’s a great quote from the poet Lin Yutang: ‘What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?’” she said.

Gambito came to Fordham in 2008, and in 2011, she became editor of Cura, Fordham’s literary magazine. The magazine, which is a collaboration among the faculty, the public, and students, publishes twice annually online. This school year’s theme, “Black Lives Matter,” was chosen in response to the recent racial bias events both on campus and off.

“Speaking with students, we said ‘We can do something about this. We don’t have to just observe. We can act as artists and encourage a voice against this action,” she said.

Claudia Rankine, whose book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, will help to edit the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 issues. Gambito teaches Citizen in her classes. She says one of the biggest challenges she faces is convincing students that the book, which recounts racial aggressions in encounters in daily life and in the media, is written for them, no matter what their racial background.

“We want to collect student voices from both campuses and feature them alongside the pieces we’re finding from members of the public. Poetry, fiction, some fantastic digital creative writing, creative nonfiction, visual arts; it runs the gamut,” Gambito said.

“It’s an issue for all of us to pay attention to.”

The Fall 2015 issue of Cura is being published at the end of the year, and is drawing some of its material from art coming from within the creative writing workshops. As such, Gambito is adamant that students are present for the workshops.

“It’s not just the poems that they bring in, or their stories, but it is what we co-create together. Sitting and speaking to each other is another kind of art. So I tell them, the workshop is mandatory,” she said.

“If you’re not here, we miss what you could have said. We miss what we could have created as a class,” she said. “I don’t make distinctions between writing and critiquing. We’re creating together, we’re imagining together what a poem can be.”

Five members of Fordham’s Department of English will participate in a panel discussion on the challenging yet increasingly popular genre of memoir, and read from their works.

“The Art of the Memoir”
Tuesday, May 1
7 p.m.
12th Floor Lounge, Lowenstein, Lincoln Center Campus

Moderated by Susan Kamil, publisher of Random House and Dial Press imprints, the panel will consist of faculty members who have recently published memoirs. Speakers will present short readings of their works, ranging in subject matter from the AIDS crisis to the Holocaust, followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A.

Panelists include:

•    Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor of English, author of Paris in Love (Random House, 2012), a memoir of her sabbatical year in Paris, which is currently #35 on The New York Times bestseller nonfiction list;
•    Richard Giannone, Ph.D., professor emeritus of English, author of Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire (Fordham University Press, 2012), a chronicle of Giannone’s transformation from a solitary gay academic to the primary caregiver of his dying mother and sister;
•    Eve Keller, Ph.D., professor of English, and director of graduate studies in the English Department, author of Two Rings: A Story of Love and War (PublicAffairs, 2012), a story co-authored by Keller and Millie Werber, who was a teenager during the Holocaust;
•    Kim Dana Kupperman, writer-in-residence, author of the award-winning I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Grayworld, 2010), a collection of autobiographical, personal, and lyric essays; and
•    Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English, who helped Dina Matos McGreevey write her memoir,Silent Partner (Hyperion, 2010), and author of A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student (Algonquin, 2002), which tells the story of Stone’s student, Vincent, who left Stone his diaries and asked her to write about him following his death from AIDS.

The panel is sponsored by Fordham’s Creative Writing program, the Deans of Arts and Sciences, and PublicAffairs Books.