I processed all my Franklin Court/1976 feelings in what became one of the poems in the book (excerpt shown here) with lines still crack me up, “IT WAS 1976 IN PHILADELPHIA AND WE WERE ALL BENJAMIN FRANKLIN”
Sue Landers
@slanders.bsky.social
948 followers 564 following 219 posts
Poet, pedestrian. My book WHAT TO CARRY INTO THE FUTURE (Roof, 2025) emerged from riding every NYC subway end to end. A love letter to the city, it charts joy amidst catastrophe. suelanders.com (she/her)
![Paragraph from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ SURVIVAL IS A PROMISE that reads: “In retrospect, [Barbara] Smith calls the experience of keeping Kitchen Table Press alive through repeated heroic efforts “traumatic.” The fact that the press continued to publish, reprint, and distribute meaningful works of literature for more than eleven years is a miracle in the sense that it was an impossible thing that happened. But it did not happen by magic; it happened at a great cost. It taught those involved, especially Smith, something about pressure and the tension between collective vision and individual accountability. Groups of people continually rallied to support KTP, but Barbara knew that if she stopped devoting full-time unpaid labor to the work, the press would close that same year.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6weasn64lspkhzv67vxdb3ah/bafkreiehc24mj4x7jyqkt7ixezrlx7wrroxepmk2cofjrxfdoi47lu4eay)
