Listen to African American Carla M. Cherry — a native of Bronx, New York — share about living and working as a New York City teacher and attending graduate school online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Carla and I met through the City College of New York MFA Reading Series where she performed her poetry. In 2020 I organized the reading series along with a few other MFA candidates: Kristine Esser Slentz, S.E. Hamlet, Dilan Schulte, and Matthew Gahler. Carla shares about her family ancestry: her father’s family is originally from North Carolina and they migrated to New York in the 1930s and her mother’s family is from Kentucky and they migrated to Queens in the 20th Century.
“I did start taking the subways during the pandemic. If I had doctors’ appointments…and I have to say, I've never seen the subways so clean, you know, until the pandemic, because, you know, they really were doing a good job of trying to keep everything clean…” Carla shares about living and working in New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic. “…Sometimes, you know, a whole bunch of us would be crowded in several [subway] cars, because the other cars were being occupied by people who were sleeping who had spent the night on the train…”
