Queer Archives - 4/29/24

Conversation Overview

Join C. Jerome Woods, Founding Director of the Black LGBT Project, and Nix Mendy, Digital Archive Coordinator for OUTWORDS, for a conversation on the significance of community archives and preserving the marginalized histories of Black and Queer communities facilitated by UGS Librarian Asa Wilder.

C. Jerome Woods, Founding Director of the Black LGBT Project (chronicles the lives and contributions of Black LGBT persons and their significant others) is a published poet and author whose work has appeared in various queer and mainstream publications as well as recorded on compact disc, and appears in "Jewel's Catch One" documentary on Netflix. Rooted in family, friends, and community, the Louisiana native and retired educator sits on several community advisory boards, art panels, and councils.  This year marks Woods' second year as a Steering Committee Member for ONE Institute's CIRCA:  Queer Histories Festival 2024. Woods hopes to communicate and collaborate with individuals, organizations, agencies, and institutes in decreasing and/or eradicating HIV/AIDS, homelessness, illiteracy, age and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, incarceration, and stigma and shame in the international community(ies).

Nix Mendy (they/them) is a graduate of Simmons University's Archives Management program and the Digital Archive Coordinator for OUTWORDS. They conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ elders, collect and manage interviewees' digital photographs, make interviews accessible and discoverable through the website, and support external programming. They also lead the Content Advisory Task Force in addressing sensitive and challenging content. Beyond OUTWORDS, they serve as Research Coordinator (Project Archivist) for the "Digitizing the Moving Images of the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest" grant at Northern Arizona University, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH grant supports the digitization and promotion of hundreds of archival films from NAU and Indigenous partners' (Hualapai, Hopi, and Navajo) collections. In all roles, Nix hopes to inspire greater self-determination from historically marginalized people by challenging under- and misrepresentation in archives.