‘Exceptional in their commitment to our great city’: Buffalo names new city historian, poet laureate

Lindsey Lauren Visser, 32, was named Monday as the first female city historian and Aitina Fareed-Cooke, 37, as the city’s second poet laureate.

“Both women are exceptional in their commitment to our great city,” Mayor Byron Brown said in making the announcement at City Hall.

Both unpaid positions are for one year and can be extended an additional year. 

Fareed-Cooke has a media arts company, Get Fokus’d Productions, and is a rapper and lyricist who performs under the name A.I. the Anomaly. She was a featured artist on Lecrae Moore’s “Church Clothes 4” album that won a Grammy for best contemporary Christian album this year.  

She also co-curated curated the 2022 exhibition “In These Truths” at Albright-Knox Northland.

“Overall, I’m a creative arts strategist, within multiple mediums,” Fareed-Cooke said. “My main aspiration is to ignite thought and expand perspective through the creative arts. This position is another opportunity to do that.”

Visser has a head full of ideas to bring Buffalo’s rich history to life. She’ll now have the chance to put them into practice.

“Buffalo plays such a key role in so many major moments, and there is so much to tell,” she said. “We know some of the greatest hits – the major people, the big things – but that’s just the surface, even just the tiniest little piece of the surface.

“There is a stretch from 1880 to 1920, for instance, that no matter what is going on nationally there is some tie to Buffalo,” she said.

Her…