CUNY this year unveiled an ambitious plan for transforming into the nation’s foremost student-centered university system by the end of this decade. One of the ways the “CUNY Lifting New York” strategic plan is getting off the ground is with the help of a new Office of Transformation created by Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. The office’s leaders, Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson, join the CUNYcast to offer a glimpse of CUNY’s transformation from the front lines.
Rachel Stephenson (left), the University’s chief transformation officer, is a longtime CUNY leader who has been the founding director of initiatives including the CUNY Service Corps, CUNY Cultural Corps and the Dream.US scholarship program.
Cathy N. Davidson is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English who’s one of the nation’s leading higher education thinkers and innovators. She’s the founding director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center and the author of more than 20 books, most recently “The New College Classroom.”
RELATED LINKS
CUNY Office of Transformation: The Initiatives
CUNY Lifting New York: The Plan 
 
 

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Alvin Eng’s long, strange trip began in his family’s laundry in Flushing (presided over by his Cantonese opera-singing “Empress Mother”). From there, somehow, he became  an adolescent punk rocker and then a downtown playwright and storyteller inspired by a delayed embrace of his Chinese heritage. He teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and if his students want to know more than what’s on Rate My Professors, they can read his memoir. It’s just out in paperback.
RELATED LINKS

* More about Alvin Eng
* A bit about his academic life at BMCC
* NYT: How a memoirist and playwright spends his Sundays 
* Alvin on YouTube

    
Her father’s absence when she was growing up made half of Ava Chin’s family history a family mystery. But when she finally met him in Chinatown, in her twenties, it sparked a years-long quest that not only uncovered her own family’s remarkable story but revealed the much deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century.  Chin, a professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, tells a deeply personal story with the sweep of history in Mott Street: A Chinese Amerian Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.”
 

Sidik Fofana started out writing rap songs as a kid, but it was fiction that really took hold when he was in college. It was a passion, if not a realistic career ambition, and so he kept at it while earning a masters in education at City College, and when he became a high school teacher in Brooklyn. Last summer, more than a decade later, Sidik finally got his first book published —  a collection called “Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.”  And then this spring came big news: He was a winner of the prestigious Whiting Award for Emerging Writers. Sidik’s CUNY connection is ongoing: For the past nine years he’s taught in the University’s College Now program, which offers college credit to New York city public high school students.

In a profession where you publish a story and you’re so happy to get $500 and then someone gives you this big award and tells you you’re getting $50,000 – it’s just, wow. It’s a stamp of approval.

 

Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family’s history–but so remote for Americans today–that it became the driving force for her to become a writer. “I wanted to force it into our cultural consciousness because it’s known as the Forgotten War,” Kim tells Joe Tirella on this episode of CUNY Book Beat. “I went to public school [in New York] and I think the Korean War was one paragraph sandwiched between World War Two and the Vietnam War. And I found that really frustrating as a child because my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my family experienced it.”
The Korean War is the backdrop of Kim’s widely hailed 2018 debut novel, If You Leave Me, in which she digs into her cultural roots to tell the story of a young woman’s life-altering choices as she and her family struggle to survive the war. Now a visiting assistant professor at Queens College, Kim was named to the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list in 2022, and her second novel, The Stone Home, will be published next year.

* More about Crystal Hana Kim and If You Leave Me

 

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
As CUNY’s first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, Ryan Martin has quickly built a program featuring men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams that compete against colleges from around the country. Martin is a national leader and advocate for adaptive sports and a veteran wheelchair basketball player himself. Born with spina bifida, he lost both his legs when he was two years old but went on to play in college and then professionally in Europe.  His focus is on bringing athletes with disabilities to CUNY, but he says it’s ultimately not about the game.
“I can talk all day about the numbers of wins and losses and the percentage of shots I want to take,” Martin says on the CUNYcast, “but being an individual with a disability, I think the number one thing is what are they doing three or five years from now — are they in a better position than they would have been had they not participated in this program?”
Related Links
Follow @cuny_adaptive on Instagram
CUNAC Wheelchair Basketball on the web
More about Ryan Martin: Changing the Landscape of Adaptive Sports
Learn about Ryan Martin’s foundation for athletes with disabilities
Ryan Martin huddles with his team during a recent tournament hosted by CUNY.

 
Queens College alum Nira Burstein spent six years making “Charm Circle,” an intensely personal documentary that took Burstein and her camera inside her childhood home in Flushing on a quest to understand the emotional chaos of her parents’ lives. Burstein is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25  New Faces of Independent Film, and “Charm Circle” has been hailed at film festivals around the world for its unflinching examination of her family’s struggles with mental illness and her own journey in confronting familial bonds that are often hidden. The film was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image in Long Island City as part of the 12th annual Queens World Film Festival.

* Click HERE for more about “Charm Circle” 

 
 

 
An ambitious new exhibition at Queensborough Community College’s renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center offers a new way  to understand the enormity of Nazi genocide by documenting the staggering number of sites across Europe where Hitler’s murderous army carried out his Final Solution. “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” is an immersive multimedia exhibit that includes first-person accounts by local Holocaust survivors, hundreds of images from the world’s leading Holocaust museums and a wall-sized map that illustrates how much more extensive the system was than most people realize.
Laura Cohen, the Kupferberg Center’s executive director, and Cary Lane, the exhibition’s curator, talk about the sobering installation, the two years of painstaking and emotional work that went into creating it, and why it matters 80 years later.

* Visit the exhibition’s website to read text and see videos, images and other content.
* Take an interactive 360-degree online tour.
* Learn more about the Kupferberg Holocaust Center 

Nearly six decades after he reluctantly dropped out of City College, Ciro Scala went back in 2016 and earned both an undergraduate and master’s degree from CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. Now he’s fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and he’s giving something back. He created a workshop program to help first-generation college students navigate some of the same kinds of challenges that sidetracked his own degree when he was a young first-gen student himself.













 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
RELATED LINKS

* The New York Times: ‘I Was Not Whole’: Why a Grandfather Went Back to College
* CUNY News: Chancellor Visits Ciro Scala’s First Gen Seminar

“West Side Story” is beloved for its music, dance and romanticism but has long been dogged by criticism of its stereotyping of Puerto Rican characters and the casting of white actors to play them in the 1961 movie. When Steven Spielberg set out to make a reimagined version, he and screenwriter Tony Kushner tapped Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol to help them portray New York’s Puerto Rican community of the 1950s with more authenticity and nuance. As a leading scholar of the history of Puerto Ricans in New York – and a Nuyorican who came of age in the time and place of “West Side Story” herself – Korrol was a natural to serve as the film’s historical consultant. First, though, she had to get past her skepticism that Spielberg and Kushner could pull it off.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol graduated from Brooklyn College a year before “West Side Story” was released and went on to become the long-time chair of the college’s groundbreaking Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies and a foundational figure of that field. Among her books is From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City.
As part of her involvement with “West Side Story,” Korrol worked with María Pérez y González, deputy chair of the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies department, to create “West Side Story: The Brooklyn Connection,” an online lecture series featuring appearances by Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and experts with perspectives on the history, culture and music of “West Side Story.” Click here to see videos of those conversations.
Related Links

More About How CUNY Helped Tell a More Nuanced “West Side Story”
West Side Story: The Brooklyn Connection lecture series