Listen to New Yorker and African American Janelle Poe, MFA, from Harlem who also identifies as Black, because she sees Black as a “diasporic, global, racial, cultural category.” Her parents are from New York. Her grandparents are from Alabama and Mississippi. Her grandfather was a sharecropper who dropped out of school in the sixth grade in Mississippi in order to help feed his family. Janelle is a first-generation-PhD candidate. She is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at City College of New York. We met in the MFA program at City College when we were both pursuing our Master of Fine Arts degrees. She was teaching undergraduate students online and attending doctoral classes online during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

In 2022 Janelle laments the requirement for proof-of-vaccine to enter certain spaces in N ...