Holding HIV
Poems of HOPE
by Pauline Sameshima , Emily Turner and Dazié Grego-Sykes

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What could an HIV cure mean? Holding HIV shares the raw, poetic voices of 27 San Francisco community members living with or affected by HIV. Born from the HOPE Research Collaboratory’s Community Arts Integrated Research program, this collection reveals poetry’s power to distill life’s profound joys, deep anguish, and everyday realities into a roadmap for cure research—where hope and fear collide, and resilience becomes the heart of progress. As part of an HIV cure research project, participants created clay “holders” as artistic responses to the “Block-Lock-Stop” strategy (an epigenetic approach to permanently inactivate HIV) and to two questions—“What excites you about an HIV cure?” and “What are your fears regarding an HIV cure?" Three poets then translated participants’ discussions about their art, contextualizing hopes and anxieties alongside the devastating 2025 United States’ federal HIV funding cuts. These narratives are more important than ever as ongoing challenges to HIV research and prevention threaten the significant progress of recent decades.

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Pauline Sameshima (she/her) is an education professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. Pauline has been using poetry as a research methodology since the early 2000s. Her haiku was one of 15 selected by the League of Canadian Poets for the 2019 publication Collected Haiku. Her favourite pastimes are cooking with her children and arranging flowers from her garden. solspire.com Emily Turner (she/her) is a graduate student in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay campus, specializing in social justice education. Before starting her degree, she worked for a community-based arts and culture magazine where she developed her passion for storytelling. A lifelong writer of poetry, she intends to use poetic inquiry as a research tool going forward in her career. Dazié Grego-Sykes (he/him) is a California-based poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist with a passion for artistic expression and storytelling. Over the last two decades, his work has captivated audiences using a unique blend of spoken word, solo performance, music, and community engagement. Holding a B.A. in Experimental Performance and an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing, Dazié draws from his experiences living with HIV and explores identity, race, queerness, and social justice. daziégrego.com

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Contributors

Author

Pauline Sameshima

Author

Emily Turner

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Dazié Grego-Sykes

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