Our session, “Works in Progress: A Roundtable on Community Archives, Kinship, and the Uses of Creative Nonfiction,” is grounded in a shared interest in writing and a commitment to community engaged scholarship. We will discuss our uses of archives and the question of our sometimes-conflicting roles as scholars, activists, community members, and storytellers. We hope to elaborate a set of shared questions on genre, method, and the uses of kinship particularly in personal narrative/creative nonfiction. What kinds of poetics will help suture individual recollection to family-held stories? What aesthetic and ethical postures help us move through colonial archives, at once violent and intimate? How, for instance, do we reckon with an intensely felt affiliation to the photographed in official visual archives when incomplete record-keeping thwarts attempts to formalize lineages? What ethics and strategies are at play in writing with the living? What’s at stake in shifting from academic to public audiences? We will also explore how personal and community archives might engender another kind of writing about a place. Our current place-based research projects center a dialogue between Black life past and present in Baltimore, Maryland, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Texas, New York City, and Kingston, Jamaica. We seek methods that attend to researching community archives, unfixing the straight lines of narration, and rethinking the hierarchy of collaboration to allow for a deeper knowledge of process, co-creation, and mutuality. The roundtable is an opportunity to share the kinds of questions that inform our works in progress, so that we might enliven our writing and think ahead together, about our methods, community stakeholders, and with a shared set of questions that may inform our works in progress across the fields of Black, ethnic and gender, literary, and historical studies.