Mini Story: Janet Hulstrand (Study Abroad)

For the first three years of Janet Hulstrand’s Paris study abroad program, Paris Through the Eyes of Travelers, she brought students from Hunter College of the City University of New York for a month-long literary adventure. They walked in the footsteps of literary giants—reading Lost Generation writers, experiencing l’art de vivre in Parisian cafés, and traveling the city’s arrondissements at the height of tourist season. But for Hulstrand, that wasn’t enough. She wanted her students to connect more deeply with the Paris they were actually in—to engage not just through its past, but with its living-literary culture. The next year would be different.

On July 25, 2000, Hulstrand’s Hunter College students spent three and a half hours with James A. Emanuel at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. He gave a poetry reading, left plenty of time for discussion, and sold twenty-six books. Emanuel documented in his “Christmas Notes” that he met with Hulstrand and her study abroad students regularly in subsequent years, at venues such as the Maison des Étudiants Arméniens and Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle. During these class sessions, Emanuel often collaborated with Godelieve Simons—an engraver and close-artistic partner—who would present her engravings that were inspired by Emanuel’s poetry, and afterwards, Emanuel gave a poetry reading.

A friendship between Hulstrand and Emanuel seemed inevitable. Both born in the Midwest, they became writers, editors, and teachers who relocated to New York City and possessed an affinity for France. Their writings reflect their perspectives of place, which is evident in Emanuel’s Black Man Abroad: The Toulouse Poems and Hulstrand’s A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France. Yet, it was Hulstrand’s students who helped their paths converge. Emanuel likely appreciated their CUNY connection; Hunter College sits a little over four miles from City College, where he had taught for twenty-six years. In some ways his participation in this study abroad program was a full-circle experience: Emanuel had taken sabbaticals from teaching his CUNY students to spend years as a Fulbright and visiting professor teaching African American Literature to French students at the universities in Grenoble and Toulouse, respectively. And here he was in the early 2000s, an expatriate in Paris, sharing his poetry with CUNY study-abroad students.

This is not to say that Emanuel had severed his ties to CUNY. Between 1995 and 2006, he contributed a poem nearly every year to the City College Annual Poetry Festival. In 2003, he deepened that commitment by creating the “James A. Emanuel Poetry Prize” at City College to encourage younger poets. His encouragement of younger poetry was important, for Emanuel stated in an interview with Hulstrand that “that reading or writing poetry could lead to revolutionary thought. Dictators keep their eyes on libraries, and in our truly thoughtful moments we know why” (Hulstrand October, 2009). Perhaps his engagement with the Hunter College students—and later Queen College students—in Paris helped to inspire this poetry award.

In 2009, Hulstrand wrote in her literary-travel blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road that “nearly 300 students” had participated in Paris Through the Eyes of Travelers (Hulstrand March 2009). Emanuel remained involved with the program through the summer of 2013; he died less than three months later. At 92, though he was beginning to show signs of slowing down, he remained committed to serving the students. His continued involvement speaks not only to his dedication but their friendship guided by Hulstrand’s use of literature to build and sustain connections between people and places, across borders, and over time.