Founded by Bob Lewis and Stephen Dima, Fulton Stall Market is a non-profit public marketplace that connects farmers and producers with the lower Manhattan community. Located in the historic district where NYC’s public markets began in the 1700’s, Fulton Stall Market’s storefront is a first step toward reviving a year-round multiple-vendor public market– a place to learn more about the region’s food producers and the area’s vibrant cultural history. Please join WWI president Karen Karbiener and board member Andrew Rimby for a lively chat and chew with Bob and Stephen on site at 91 South Street!
Stephen Dima is President of the nonprofit Fulton Market Association and co-founder of the Fulton Stall Market in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan. He is a Brooklyn native whose family and community roots drive his concern for New York City neighborhoods and cultural preservation. As founder and President of Dima Productions, he has created and produced some of the largest festivals and community events in NYC including the Seaport Music Festival, River to River Festival and the NY Comedy Festival. He hosts a weekly radio show “My Ears Are Bent”, broadcast live from the Fulton Stall Market. Mondays 10am-12pm em-radio.com
Bob Lewis is Fulton Market Association’s Public Market Advisor. He is a regional and environmental planner who has played a key role in developing and strengthening NYC’s regional food system for over 45 years. After co-founding NYC’s citywide Greenmarket Farmers Market program in 1976, he created and directed multiple statewide interagency marketing and nutrition programs for the NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets that have revived hundreds of farmers markets across the state that support family farmers, provide urban consumers with renewed access to fresh, affordable, locally grown food, and encourage learning, human interaction, vibrant communities and a sense of place. He is a native Brooklynite whose grandfather, an early Squibb & Sons’ chemist at its Brooklyn waterfront headquarters, was once visited in his office by Walt Whitman.
Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman (most recently working with Brian Selznick on Live Oak, with Moss, a new illustrated edition of Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems). As a cultural activist in her hometown, Karen is thrilled that Fulton Stall Market is generously contributing space and good will towards WWI’s latest project: the ever-growing Tane Whitman Research Library on the second floor of historic 91 South Street.
Andrew Rimby (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. Candidate and queer activist at Stony Brook University researching 19th-century literature from a queer transatlantic perspective. He is the 2019 inaugural recipient of the Guiliano Global Fellowship, a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow, and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences. He is the Executive Director of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room, a Public Humanities podcast that features literary and artistic interviews. He is the Curator of the Whitman Tane Library for the Walt Whitman Initiative where he also serves as a board member. He recently published “Talking Back to Walt Whitman” in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and he is the Associate Editor for the Watchung Review.