ABOUT

The whole world tipped.

Two days after the 2024 election, I woke up thinking: we are now—every one of us—about to live under the dignity-shattering, ever-changing violence of Jim Crow. I wrote that sentence down, and it became Noticing Unalienable Rights. I have been writing ever since, posting Noticings here and on Substack.

Then I began to notice a pattern in the things I’ve made.

Cup of Sugar exists to create small, durable rooms of attention where care, dignity, and relationship can be practiced under civic fracture and climate disruption, without scale, spectacle, or extraction.

I have been doing this kind of work since I was ten years old. I am not a planner. I start with a problem. Each project, production, or event I’ve made has appeared on its own kind of stage, asking to be understood.

To my way of thinking, problems are dramas. Just like every play on any stage, anywhere and anytime, each one pivots on a central problem in search of a solution—sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, always a drama as sharp as a rose prick breaking skin.

My work attempts to unravel specific puzzlements. In 1972, my partner and I coined the phrase single mother to give visibility and respect to women raising children by themselves. We created Momma, the Newsmagazine for Single Mothers at a time when unmarried mothers were dismissed as reckless or illiterate. When Betty Friedan was asked about Momma, she replied, “Single mothers? Can they read?”

In 1993–1994, I co-produced City of Poets in San Francisco, a public arts initiative created with Annice Jacoby. Our purpose was to bring poetry into public life across the Bay Area and to support a ballot initiative to fund the San Francisco Public Library. Events included the well-known appearance by Allen Ginsberg at Candlestick Park, where he chanted his anti-war poem Hum Bom!from the pitcher’s mound.

Like Allen Ginsberg, I understand poetry as a form of public attention and witness—an effort to remain perceptually honest in civic life rather than to persuade or instruct.

In (Out)Laws & Justice, secondary students bored by American history wrote and performed their own plays about pivotal historical events, bringing those stakes into the room and into their lives. In From a Child’s Point of View, I created space for elementary students to notice their feelings about climate change.

This was important because no one was asking how young children felt about habitat loss or rising seas. Their nightmares were absent from the curriculum. Cup of Sugar began when I wanted voters to connect their personal needs with issues on the 2024 ballot.

You can find me here, on Bluesky or Substack: Lisa Citron or @gotcupofsugar.

Rose and Poppy talking about it.

“Cup of Sugar exists to create small, durable rooms of attention where care, dignity, and relationship can be practiced under civic fracture and climate disruption, without scale, spectacle, or extraction.”