CUNY Radio Podcasts

A conversation about CUNY's ambitions for the coming years with Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson of the new Office of Transformation.

How BMCC's Alvin Eng found his soul as an ‘acoustic punk rock raconteur.'

CSI and Graduate Center professor Ava Chin uncovers her family's remarkable history and reveals the deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century in "Mott Street."

Sidik Fofana, a high school teacher who earned his masters in education at City College, wrote fiction on the side for a decade. He finally got his first book published -- and was awarded a prestigious Whiting Award for Emerging Writers.

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.

Ryan Martin, CUNY's first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, has quickly built a nationally recognized wheelchair basketball program. His focus is on bringing athletes with disabilities to CUNY, but he says it's ultimately not about the game.

Queens College alum Nira Burstein talks about making "Charm Circle," her intensely persona, award-winning documentary about the fractured emotional landscape of her parents' lives in the house in Flushing where Burstein grew up.

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?

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.

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.

An immersive new exhibition at Queensborough Community College's renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center documents the vastness of the Nazi's system of genocide. The center's Laura Cohen and Cary Lane discuss the exhibit and the emotional toll of creating it.

Nearly six decades after he dropped out, Ciro Scala went back to City College, earned two degrees and started a workshop program to help first-generation college students navigate some of the same kinds of challenges that sidetracked his hopes for a college degree.

Timothy Hunter (Baruch MPA '23 and City Tech '20) and Djenabou Barry (City College MPA '22 '20 and Guttman '19) join me in discussing how they founded the incredible CUNY-led initiative Strategy for Black Lives as well as how they utilized both their community networks and their studies at CUNY to contribute to the BLM movement--all the while learning more about themselves and the world around them.

Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol talks about her role as historical consultant for Steven Spielberg's reimagined "West Side Story" and how she helped portray New York's Puerto Rican community of the 1950s with more authenticity and nuance.

Zohra Saed, a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, and Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School alumna, have mounted a high-stakes campaign to help an imperiled Afghan writer and his family flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Student leader Dave Basnet--a Hunter senior who was just named a Rhodes Scholar--joins Hannah to discuss his experiences being a DACA recipient from Nepal, the various trials and tribulations he faced when solidifying his legal status, and what could be done to make the immigration process more accessible to undocumented people.

National Book Award finalist Grace Cho talks about "Tastes Like War," a memoir of her quest to understand her mother's journey from Korean War bride in the Pacific Northwest to her struggle with schizophrenia.

In "Sparring with Smokin' Joe," CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali -- one that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier's life inside and outside the ring.

CUNY Student Trustee Juvanie Piquant (City Tech '22) joins me in discussing mental health, how we're feeling about the stress and anxiety surrounding this fall semester, and how we care for ourselves during difficult times — uncensored, unedited, uncut.

Jimmy Carter is often thought of as a failed one-term president, but in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY's Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he's given credit for.

Ralph Blumenthal's "The Believer" tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they'd had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.

As he prepares to retire after a prodigious career spanning nearly 50 years, a conversation with the founding father of many of CUNY's most innovative and consequential programs of this century.

CUNY's School of Public Health has launched CONVINCE USA, part of a global project to reduce ungrounded fears and misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines and persuade the resistant that the shot is safe, effective--and necessary to end the pandemic.  Dr. Scott Ratzan talks about the challenges and the strategies.

Brooklyn College alumnus Robert Jones Jr.'s debut novel, "The Prophets," is a different kind of love story: It reaches across centuries, continents and cultures to tell a soulful story of love between two young men enslaved on a plantation in the antebellum American South.

For Derek Fordjour, an alumnus of Hunter College’s MFA program, the turmoil of 2020 was a canvas for a breakthrough year featuring two critically acclaimed exhibitions. He talks about his life and how he turned his work as a multidisciplinary artist into dazzling and emotional social observation.

A new year conversation with Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health on the state of vaccines, the threat of the mutated virus and what the Biden administration needs to do to turn the tide of the pandemic.

In his novel Missionaries, Phil Klay--Hunter College MFA alum, Iraq War veteran and National Book Award winner--explores the globalization of war through the stories of four people caught up in the nearly 60-year conflict in Colombia.

Stan Wolfson looks back on his 60-year career as a photographer and photo editor for New York newspapers and, for the past 16 years, for CUNY.

Renowned author Walter Mosley, a City College creative writing alum, is the 2020 recipient of the National Book Foundation's lifetime achievement award. He talks about his life, his work, and the program he helped create at CCNY to open doors for minorities in the publishing industry.

Citing President Obama's intent to strengthen community colleges, "second lady" Jill Biden told the 2009 graduates of Kingsborough Community College the two-year schools are "one of America's best-kept secrets," and "the education gained on campuses like this one will provide the knowledge that will power the 21st century." Dr. Biden, an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College who taught English full-time at a Delaware community college for 16 years, referred to Obama's higher education proposal, which includes a community college initiative to better prepare students for the job market and encourages their transfer to four-year schools. "The president wants the U.S. to have the highest proportion of college graduates (in the world) by the year 2020...and he knows community colleges will play a major part in achieving this goal." Listen Now

Jessica Harris taught at Queens College for 50 years--and became the country's foremost authority on African American cuisine along the way. The author of a dozen books, she was honored this year with the James Beard Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award. She talks about it all on the CUNYcast.

CUNY legal scholar Julie Suk discusses "We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment," her book about the women behind the long battle to enshrine full equal rights for women as a Constitutional amendment.

How Harrison Sheckler, a pianist in the masters program at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, has brought together hundreds of singers and musicians for virtual performances that are bringing a little joy to this dispiriting year.

A conversation from Mexico City with Carmen Boullosa, one of the world's most celebrated Spanish-language writers and a CUNY literary treasure whose 18th novel, "The Book of Anna," has just been translated into English.

CUNY TV's third virtual town hall special on COVID-19 is a conversation on CUNY's transition to distance learning with Executive Vice Chancellor José Luis Cruz, Lehman College Provost Peter Nwosu, the Graduate Center's Cathy N. Davidson and students Sally Zieper and Kalli Siringas.  

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality. Richard Haw of John Jay College talks about his fascinating new biography, "Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling."

In "A Crisis in Motion," CUNY TV's second virtual town hall special on COVID-19, host Mike Gilliam talks with guests including Angie Kamath, University Dean for Continuing Education and Workforce Development, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the School of Public Health and students from Baruch, Hunter and the College of Staten Island.

A weekly tracking survey by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy is revealing important insights about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on New Yorkers--and vice versa. Dr. Scott Ratzan discusses what the results tell us about our collective attitudes, behaviors and beliefs--and how they might inform efforts to fight the spread of this pandemic and maybe help prevent future ones.

In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln journeyed 13 days and 1,900 miles by rail from his Illinois home to his inauguration in Washington. It was a long, tumultuous and dangerous trip through hundreds of towns where millions saw and heard Lincoln as the country hurtled toward the Civil War. Macaulay Honors College's Ted Widmer tells the dramatic story in "Lincoln on the Verge."  

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, CUNY's leading expert on the spread of the coronavirus, talks about the latest: What the last two weeks tells us about the next two and beyond. Why social distancing is so critical right now, how some Asian countries have used it to stop the virus and what we can learn from them. What to make of stories about treatments and vaccines. And more.

In her latest collection of poems, Donna Masini, a professor of English at Hunter College, moves back and forth in time--and human experience--as she copes with her younger sister's death and celebrates life through the communal act of movie-watching. She talks with Joe Tirella about 4:30 Movie, which is now out in paperback.

Matthew Goodman's "The City Game" tells the dramatic and heart-wrenching story of the 1950 City College basketball team: a moment of glory that collapsed in scandal and forever changed college basketball.

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health offers a frank assessment of the state of the emerging pandemic – and some good advice. (March 12, 2020)