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CUNY Podcasts
CUNY Podcasts

CUNY Podcasts

Podcasts from The City University of New York

Available Episodes 10


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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” 

 
 

On this latest episode of CUNY Uncut, Danny Chicon-Ramirez joins Hannah Kavanagh in discussing the importance of proper race representation in media, how the lack thereof perpetuates negative stereotypes and promotes implicit bias—and how those biases in turn impact every facet of our own personal lives. From there, we try to answer this seemingly age-old question: How can we actively deconstruct racial misrepresentation and where do we go from here?

Alyssa Kitt (GC ’22) joins host Hannah Kavanagh on this latest episode of CUNY Uncut to discuss how her illustrious burlesque career has shaped her views on body positivity, sexual pleasure, confidence, and desire.

Emily Portalatin-Mendez (Lehman ’23) appears on this latest episode of CUNY Uncut to discuss how cryptocurrency and blockchain works, the benefits of investing in it, how Web 3.0 and the metaverse fits into all of this, as well as how different cryptocurrency companies plan on mitigating the environmental and classist issues associated with it—all the while Hannah and the listeners plunge themselves into the unknown.
 


Host
Hannah Kavanagh
Macaulay at Hunter ‘22
Hannah Kavanagh is a Macaulay@Hunter senior that initially majored in political science and journalism until this past semester, when she switched to a film major to pursue her passion for filmmaking and acting–all the while minoring in Arabic. She is currently the host and executive producer of CUNY Uncut, as well as her seminal podcast Tea For Three—which has garnered a cult following over the course of her college career. She was also active in Hunter College’s Undergraduate Student Government this past year as a junior senator.
Instagram
E-mail


Guests:

Emily Portalatin-Mendez
Macaulay at John Jay College ’23
Emily Portalatin-Mendez (she/her) is a rising senior majoring in computer science and minoring in finance at Lehman College. She is also a Presidential Scholar and an award-winning software developer with industry specialties in information systems and risk management. Through her work as the President of the CUNY Digital Currency Initiative and beyond, she aims to strategically blend enterprise systems design with public, private, and social sector programs to positively impact local economies of scale.
Instagram
LinkedIn

 
Referenced Sources:

* SheFi (female-run organization that focuses on crypto education for women and non-binary people)
* opensea.io (a platform dedicated to NFT sales and distributions)
* pointer.gigi (website dedicated to crypto education)
* Vitamin3.xyz (sends over automated text-based snippets about crypto)

Hanna Yeum (Macaulay @ John Jay ’23) and Kimberly Paredes (John Jay ’22) join Hannah in discussing their experiences dealing with and responding to racial injustice, how CUNY’s response to such acts prompted them to start John Jay’s APISA Club, and what they hope to accomplish through their club’s mission to validate students and ensure that they feel seen.