Holding HIV

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.