There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Then there are years marked by someone like IfeMichelle Gardin, who in 2024 “exposed the questions that the answers hide” — as artists do, according to James Baldwin.
Gardin is authoring a new chapter of New Haven’s literary history in the form of Kulturally Lit, an organization that blossomed over the past year during what would have been James Baldwin’s 100th year of life.
In previous years, Gardin organized an annual Elm City LIT Fest — a day teeming with literary discussions and activities, often centered around themes such as Black romance or Afrofuturism.
In 2024, she and her team institutionalized Kulturally LIT as a non-profit and took on a year of continual programming: “The Year of Baldwin.” Gardin stewarded a series of dialogues, performances, and celebrations throughout the year in honor of the civil rights-era writer known for prescient and piercing observations about race and power in America.
“I’ve been to book festivals in other places,” Gardin recalled — places like Harlem, Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit — “and I was like, I want to do that. I want to make that happen here. And create that kind of literary community.”
Her efforts led to the naming of New Haven’s first-ever poet laureate this year, to panel discussions featuring nationally-acclaimed writers, to intergenerational book clubs poring over Baldwin’s words, to DC Comic characters coming to life through costumes at DiasporaCon. New Haveners watched films, heard play readings, and waded through books together, their fervent conversations spilling out into the parking lot.
At each gathering, Gardin and her collaborators resurrected a new cluster of questions: Will it ever be possible, and is it even desirable, to be free from history? Is Black speculative fiction intrinsically radical? What does it mean for artists to retain their integrity while making money from their work? Why is America so hungry for stories of Black suffering? How do you hold onto hope in an enduringly unjust world?
New Haven is a city often known for its answers — especially for the research findings and intellectual theorizing within the iron gates of Yale. Books are among the starkest markers of the town-gown line: local public schools are racing to shore up students’ reading skills blocks away from deeply-funded, intricately-guarded Ivy League libraries.
But Gardin is cultivating another narrative about New Haven’s local literary culture: one created for and by the public, rooted in a local tradition of Black artistic life that has long bubbled outside university walls.
“Ms. Ife is a giant. She is an icon,” said Kulturally LIT team member Shamain McAllister. “This is her vision, her dream, her baby, her passion for literature, writing, culture, and really highlighting those of the African Diaspora in a very inclusive way.”
According to the city’s poet laureate, Sharmont “Influence” Little, “Kulturally LIT right now is the heart of urban art in New Haven.”
"If You Read, Then You'll Start Thinking"
Gardin, 65, is the descendant of Macon, Georgia, sharecroppers. Her grandparents moved to New Haven during the Great Migration in the 1930s; her grandfather found work at the Winchester Arms Rifle Factory, which had only recently begun to hire Black workers. They moved to New Haven initially in public housing, and eventually bought a house of their own on Read Street. Art and culture pulsed through her family, from one grandmother’s quilting circles to another’s involvement with Black Expo at the New Haven Armory.
Gardin grew up in a large and tight-knit family, spending afternoons on her grandparents’ front porch. She was always aware of her neighborhood’s perimeter: “Prospect Street was a barrier,” the line delineating Newhallville from East Rock Yalies. Within Newhallville, however — a neighborhood where Black families were increasingly moving as white residents fled to the suburbs — Gardin and her siblings would roam freely, trick-or-treating from Division Street to the Hamden town line on Halloween.
As a kid, she studied dance from the renowned Black lesbian academic and activist Angela Bowen, who at the time ran the Bowen/Peters School of Dance. And she read three writers in particular who opened up the world for her: Zora Neale Hurson, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. “Once I started reading those three authors,” she said, “I wanted everything.”
She went on to study communications and media at Morgan State, and then after a brief stint working at a bank on Wall Street, she took a job at Essence Magazine, and then at the Harlem Cultural Council. Over the course of the next few decades, she zig-zagged between Harlem, Brooklyn, and New Haven, until moving back to the Elm City full-time in 2017.
She worked for a variety of arts organizations in New Haven, from Long Wharf Theater to the Arts Council to the Yale Drama School’s Dwight/Edgewood Project. And she organized a litany of artistic gatherings, from the Ifetayo Cultural Festival to an exhibit at the Shubert Theater in honor of the dancer Paul Hall.
She now works as a facilitator for the Institute Library’s Social Justice Reader Fellowship, the city’s Comprehensive Plan public input process, and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s Neighborhood Leadership program, while serving as a city Cultural Affairs commissioner. With each step in her career, she sought to make Black art and literature more public and accessible.
Gardin’s focus on Black literature has taken on a particular political resonance this year. According to PEN America, the 2023 – 24 school year saw record numbers of school book bans, which disproportionately targeted books discussing racial identity and queerness. Three school districts in Iowa and Florida specifically prohibited Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain.
Meanwhile, incoming President Donald Trump has vowed to defund schools that discuss what he’s called “inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content” in his “Agenda 47,” suggesting that more censorship is to come.
To Gardin, these restrictions are the latest iteration of an old tactic — and a reminder of why she does what she does.
“When people were enslaved in this country, they didn’t want the enslaved to learn how to read,” she said. “Because if you read… then you’ll start thinking.”
"From Seed To Flower"
Kulturally LIT originally grew out of Gardin’s Westville kitchen, where an intergenerational team comprising Gardin, Shamain McAllister, Juanita Sunday, and Zanaiya Léon met regularly to plan and dream.
Their initial focus was Elm City LIT Fest (now Kulturally LIT Fest), an annual literary festival celebrating Black literature that took place for the fifth year in a row this past October. In just a couple of years, the festival came to garner hundreds of attendees, taking on themes like Black romance and Afrofuturism. Last year’s event, in collaboration with Yale’s Department of African American Studies and Popular Romance Fiction Conference, featured nationally renowned writers Beverly Jenkins and Roxane Gay.
Meanwhile, Sunday took the lead on planning DiasporaCon, an annual comic convention for a community of self-described “Blerds” (Black nerds). And the team decided that they were ready to take on more.
In 2024, the organization officially became a 501(c)3 non-profit. The team moved into an official office at Southern Connecticut State University. And they decided to embark on a “Year of Baldwin” with events every month of the year.
This October, LIT Fest took place for the first time at ConnCAT’s Winchester Avenue headquarters. Simultaneous programming drew scholars, vendors, artists, playwrights, and poets, casual readers and fervent annotators and children still learning to sound out words.
Panels and workshops all day were devoted to James Baldwin. Speakers included the poet Kimberly Collins, Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT) founder Dexter Singleton, and screenwriter and playwright Marcus Gardley, who’s written an upcoming biopic of Baldwin set to star Janelle Monae. Alongside these formal discussions were participatory activities, including arts and crafts inspired by Baldwin’s words and storybook reading with local Black authors. And outside, poetry and music wafted from a stage, as booksellers, local authors, and artists tabled under tents throughout ConnCAT’s parking lot.
In short, LIT Fest was bursting at the seams with literary programming. There was too much for any one person, but something for everyone — a description that could describe Kulturally LIT’s work all year.
On top of LIT Fest and monthly book club meetings, the organization hosted the third annual DiasporaCon, a series of Baldwin-themed film screenings, and a theatrical reading of Baldwin’s “A Blues For Mister Charlie” at the Bienecke Library, among other events.
And they worked with the city’s cultural affairs director, Adriane Jefferson, to install Sharmont “Influence” Little as the city’s first-ever Poet Laureate.
“Just being Poet Laureate alone opened up a number of doors for me as an artist, and for future poets and poet laureates,” he said. “I have been able to enter rooms and spaces that I never even heard of or was never asked to enter.”
“Ms. Ife has been a mentor to a number of people in the inner city and she doesn’t ask for anything in return,” Little said. He credits her with ensuring “that urban writers, Black writers, are being heard and seen.”
“One of the things I think Ife is known for, and deserves to get flowers for, is mentoring the next generation of cultural workers, broadly defined,” echoed Possible Futures bookshop owner and Gardin’s frequent collaborator, Lauren Anderson.
This September, the team found themselves in a gilded hall within the Parisian Hôtel de Talleyrand, gathered among 200 Baldwin devotees from across the world. They were there for a weeklong Centennial Festival in honor of James Baldwin, organized by the writers’ retreat La Maison Baldwin. The week was filled with poetry readings, film screenings, panels, and art. The Kulturally LIT team met Baldwin’s nephew, Trevor, along with others who had attended salon-style parties and conversations at Baldwin’s Saint-Paul-de-Vence home in France.
They were carving a place for New Haven within a much larger map of literary-minded communities — ”making New Haven a destination city,” as McAllister put it.
“I didn’t realize it until we were in Paris,” Gardin said, “and meeting people who were acknowledging the significance of the work we do. And them being surprised that we do it in Connecticut, and not in New York, or Atlanta, or DC, or Chicago… That really was validating.”
The group built connections with La Maison Baldwin’s organizers and other bearers of Baldwin’s legacy, with hopes for future collaborations. “Whenever we go, we carry New Haven with pride,” McAllister said.
“This was a beautiful year for us… seeing it from seed to flower,” McAllister said. “From just a small book festival to taking on the world and standing on our own.”
"Giving New Haven Another Look At Itself"
One defining trend of 2024 was all about optimizing answers. Google began incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could produce synthesized responses to questions typed into its search engine, as AI developers made headway in their race to produce the “smartest” technology. Somehow, this year, the Internet whirled into something even faster. Which may be one reason why “brain rot” — a half-ironic term for when someone speaks as though they exist solely online — was Oxford’s 2024’s word of the year.
The kind of communal dialogue fostered by Kulturally LIT is meaningful in contrast to what can be a slippery ease of being online, said Anderson, who co-facilitated the Baldwin Book Club at her bookstore Possible Futures this year.
The book clubs, she said, have “an opportunity for us to slow down, to be together, to concentrate, to give attention to this singular text and to these people in this room with us.”
“It’s less about finding the answer,” she added.
The result is a culture of deep thinking — and questioning — that feels more and more essential in a polarizing, accelerating world. A culture, said frequent book club attendee Babz Rawls-Ivy, all about “giving New Haven another look at itself.”
One rainy night this past November, a dozen people circled up inside Possible Futures, a social justice-centered bookshop on Edgewood Avenue for the Baldwin Book Club’s November meeting.
A smaller-than-usual group had convened on one of the first truly cold nights of the year, a few weeks after an election that left many reeling. The book at hand — The Evidence of Things Not Seen — was particularly harrowing; it centers around the streak of 28 murders of Black children and young adults in Atlanta from 1979 to 1981, with a focus on interrogating the trial and conviction of 23-year-old Wayne Williams for two of those murders.
The group spoke about the normalization of missing Black children, about the limits of what the American criminal justice system can do for victims’ families, about Baldwin’s claim that “integration” has typically involved efforts to move Black people into historically white realms, but not the other way around.
Gardin told the group that she’d found herself having to take breaks while reading. She kept thinking about the missing child posts she’s seen lately on social media. She mused that many of Baldwin’s sentences could have been written about 2024 America.
“It was like, What? Where are you?” she said, looking up as though asking Baldwin himself. “You’rehere.”
Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2023: Gaylord Salters
• 2022: Honda Smith
• 2021: Giovanni Zinn
• 2020: Maritza Bond
• 2019: Anthony Duff
• 2018: Kim Harris & Amy Marx
• 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio
• 2016: Corey Menafee
• 2015: Jim Turcio
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur
