Publication Date
2-8-2024
Document Type
Presentation
Abstract
JMU Libraries has been growing our support for Black literature and particularly, the rich literary world of Furious Flower, for years. Through the Flowerings grant and the partnership it fosters between JMU Libraries and Furious Flower, we’re entering new and exciting territory. Part of Furious Flower’s mission is to preserve the history of Black poets for future generations. This is a mission that we in the Libraries share, but one we could not realize with archival recordings alone. We are building the technical infrastructure to preserve and share these records, and we’re applying our expertise in areas like digital stewardship, archival description, scholarly communications, and metadata, but it is the people of Furious Flower Poetry Center that provide the most critical element of our preservation work. Their experience and expertise, as poets and scholars of Black poetry, is what will ultimately achieve preservation in the fullest sense for these archives. As archivists and librarians, we ensure that records persist. But it’s our partners in Furious Flower who infuse those records with meaning and context, and who in the years ahead will lead the way in imagining all kinds of new lives for them — in the classroom, in research, and in the arts.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Birch, Caitlin; Carpenter, Layne; and Flota, Brian, "Preservation as Portal to Poetry" (2024). Libraries. 260.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/letfspubs/260
