Stay up to date with the latest news about the Poetry as Activism Project!
The Poetry as Activism team will be speaking about the project at various conferences throughout 2024 and 2025. Come hear the latest about the project and ask any questions of the team at the following events:
May 30, 2024: Summer Institute on Teaching, University of Delaware
Title: Poetry as Activism: Digital Archival Materials in the Classroom
Team members presenting: Jeannette Schollaert
Abstract:
The session will explore the materials digitized for the Poetry as Activism Project and how these might be used in the classroom. Participants will walk away with an understanding of the Poetry as Activism Project resources, specific information about digitized archival materials that speak to twentieth-century American poetry and activism, and ideas about how these materials can be used in interdisciplinary classroom contexts.
June 27, 2024: Rare Book and Manuscripts Section of Association of College and Research Libraries
Title: Poetry as Activism: Creative Engagement with Digitized Archival Materials
Panel: Expanding Public Knowledge: New Methodologies for Contemporary (Poetry) Archives
Team members presenting: Lori Birrell, Jeannette Schollaert
You are invited to view the presentation’s slides.
August 2024: Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations annual conference, DH24
Title: Poetry as Activism: Creative Engagement with Digitized Archival Materials
Panel: Schedule to be announced
Team members presenting: Jeannette Schollaert
You are invited to read the abstract for the DH24 short paper presentation.
September 2024: Furious Flower Poetry Conference.
Title: “Poetry as Activism in Delaware: Poetic, Activist, and Archival Voices in Community”
Team members presenting: Traci Currie, Yalonda JD Green, Britney Henry, Jacinta Saffold
Abstract:
What does it mean to speak archival materials into being by framing them within a multimodal scholarly text? How may workshops centering the radical tradition of spoken word and other forms of vocalized resistance reorient encounters with Black liberation and Black poetry in the archive? Poetry as Activism, a Mellon-funded endeavor at the University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press, draws from Special Collections’ wealth of materials related to Black poetry and Black liberation movements throughout the twentieth century into the present. The project digitizes selections from the archives and contextualizes them in an open-access, born-digital scholarly edition. Core to the project’s mission, a poet-in-residence connects campus and local community members to the project’s mission and these newly accessible materials.
Recognizing voice as key to radical, liberatory work, Poetry As Activism is a public humanities project that speaks poetic and activist archives into being, recording and preserving them for future engagement and experimentation. This hybrid critical-creative panel considers legacies of Black activist voice(s), contemporary poetic voices of resistance, and restorative justice within archival practice. Dr. Traci Evadne Currie, inaugural Poet-in-Residence; Dr. Jacinta Saffold, editor of the forthcoming born-digital collection; project team members Dr. Yalonda JD Green and doctoral candidate Britney Henry discuss how the Poetry as Activism project enlivens the archive and uncovers tools and strategies for identifying and amplifying such work. The project reasserts poetry as a collaborative, culturally-inclusive, and transformative channel for activists’ voices and considers the impact of their work through emerging forms of testimony.
January 2025: Modern Language Association
Special Session: Poetry as Activism Edited Collection Roundtable: Engaging Archival Materials & Born-Digital Publishing
Team members presenting: Stephanie Andrea Allen, Briana Barner, Julia Oestreich, Jacinta Saffold, Jeannette Schollaert
You are invited to read the roundtable description.