Griffith, Lois Elaine: Lost & Found: Series X

Lost & Found, paperback book bundle

Publication Date: August 4, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Lost & Found Series X focuses on the literary, visual, and cultural work of Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Since its inception in 1973, this Puerto Rican cultural center has been a site where artists from the Nuyorican and Black arts movements have come to share their work, voices, histories, talents, and language on its stage. While the scant existing scholarship on the Cafe has been told from the perspectives of its predominately male and/or Latinx founders, this series seeks to reinstate Griffith’s essential role as a founder, and honor Griffith’s stewardship of the Cafe’s archive.

The four publications presented in Series X highlight how Griffith brings Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions to her archival work, disrupting the legacies of colonization and transatlantic slavery through cultural creation and preservation. Series X, edited by Lost & Found scholar and archival collaborator Joseph Cáceres, includes the following archival publications of Lois Elaine Griffith:

Dedications includes selections from unpublished poetry manuscripts of Griffith’s poetics of memorialization devoted to loved ones and others who died due to sudden illness, during the HIV/AIDS crisis, or the result of American racism.

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) includes a collection of Griffith’s surrealist visual artwork which led to collaborative projects with artists of the feminist, Black and Nuyorican arts movements.

Keeper of the Archive further documents people important to the Cafe’s legacy not found in academic narratives, whose legacies are kept alive through Griffith’s meticulous archival work. Through Griffith, we are invited to witness relationships between poet and costume designer Marcel Christian, photographers Arlene Gottfried and Tony Gleaton, and the Cafe.

Finally, You See What You See (a collaboration and co-publication with Granary Books) is a collection of Griffith’s picture-poems discovered in a notebook stored among her papers, and represents an aesthetic offering meant to inspire curiosity and collaboration, mirroring the kaleidoscopic vision of both Griffith’s and the Cafe’s aesthetic.