Cornell Chronicle: Website sheds light on 19th century Black literary culture

Cornell Chronicle: Website sheds light on 19th century Black literary culture. “The site includes 700 poems [Charline] Jao discovered and transcribed from periodicals managed by Black editors in New York City. The site is searchable by publication, title, description, author and other parameters. The website also includes collections of poems focused on themes — from deaths and elegies to hymns and songs to British poets and women poets. Another section showcases a large collection of online and textual resources.”

University of Delaware: Mellon Foundation grant supports UD Library project focused on 20th-century poet-activists of color

University of Delaware: Mellon Foundation grant supports UD Library project focused on 20th-century poet-activists of color. “The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press was recently awarded a $250,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the curation and stewardship of poetry archives related to 20th-century poet-activists of color along with a digital publishing and poet-in-residence project that draws on these collections.”

UC San Diego: UC San Diego Library Receives Grant to Digitize Archive for New Poetry Collection

UC San Diego: UC San Diego Library Receives Grant to Digitize Archive for New Poetry Collection. “Audiovisual items within the UC San Diego Library’s Archive for New Poetry (ANP) collection will be digitized and preserved thanks to a $250,000 grant awarded to the organization by the Mellon Foundation. Through this project, the team plans to digitize approximately 2,500 sound recordings and 200 films and videos in the ANP.”

University of Stirling: Burns’ influence on working class English writers revealed after the discovery of ‘lost’ works

University of Stirling: Burns’ influence on working class English writers revealed after the discovery of ‘lost’ works. “The influence of Robert Burns saw poets in the north of England writing verse in Scots, say researchers who have uncovered a host of ‘lost’ literary works penned by industrial workers in the 19th Century. The team, led by Professor Kirstie Blair of the University of Stirling, has discovered a deluge of poems, songs and short stories penned by navvies, shipbuilders, railwaymen, factory workers and miners, from Scotland and the north of England, which give unique, first-hand accounts of their lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s.”

Honolulu: Hawaii’s new poet laureate finds solace in verse

Honolulu Star-Advertiser: Hawaii’s new poet laureate finds solace in verse. “Hawaii’s new poet laureate, Brandy Nalani McDougall, sees poetry as a way to heal…. As poet laureate, she will spend the next three years encouraging the people of Hawaii to follow her on that path of healing…. She also plans to launch an indexed online archive for poets to post their own poetry.”

The Verge: Microsoft doesn’t own the rights to Minecraft’s ending — no one does, its author claims

The Verge: Microsoft doesn’t own the rights to Minecraft’s ending — no one does, its author claims. “There is no question who wrote the poem at the end of Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. Julian Gough is the one who gave the game’s unseen gods their voice, beautifully telling the player how the universe loves them — and how the player is the universe, dreaming of itself…. What we did not suspect — not till we read Gough’s new Twitter thread and an epic 10,000-word blog post that is well worth a full read — is that Microsoft may not actually own the rights to the game’s ending.”

Boing Boing: Literary Hub has an 90s style “Mathblaster” game based on Emily Dickinson

Boing Boing: Literary Hub has an 90s style “Mathblaster” game based on Emily Dickinson. “Literary Hub’s new game ‘EmilyBlaster’ could be the most engaging way to make students that are interfacing with Emily Dickinson’s work for the first time view the classic poems in a new light. Although the potential for enticing students to read Emily Dickinson exists, the game was actually created to serve as a tie-in to the novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.”

Library of Congress: Library to Celebrate Joy Harjo’s Three Terms as U.S. Poet Laureate with Reading, Dance Party and Retreat

Library of Congress: Library to Celebrate Joy Harjo’s Three Terms as U.S. Poet Laureate with Reading, Dance Party and Retreat. “The Library of Congress will celebrate Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate, as her three terms in the position come to a conclusion with two public programs at the end of April.” The closing event takes place tomorrow night (Thursday, April 28) and will be livestreamed.

Iran Human Rights Monitor: Jailed Iranian poet Baktash Abtin dies due to lack of timely medical care for Covid-19

Iran Human Rights Monitor: Jailed Iranian poet Baktash Abtin dies due to lack of timely medical care for Covid-19. “Baktash Abtin, a member of Iran’s Writer’s Association died today in a Tehran hospital after catching COVID-19 in Evin Prison. Baktash Abtin, 48, was put into an induced coma in a Tehran hospital after being rushed there from Evin Prison on December 14 with severe symptoms of COVID-19.”

PR Newswire: A digital future for Black poetry at JMU, thanks to new $2 million grant (PRESS RELEASE)

PR Newswire: A digital future for Black poetry at JMU, thanks to new $2 million grant (PRESS RELEASE). “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded James Madison University $2 million over four and a half years to secure the digital future of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center devoted to Black poetry. This generous grant will support the Center’s internationally recognized leadership and provide for archival description, digital preservation, and global access to an extensive archive of Furious Flower poetry and spoken word performance videos held by JMU Libraries Special Collections.”

The Beats within: comparing AI & human adaptations of “Howl” (Stanford Libraries)

Stanford Libraries: The Beats within: comparing AI & human adaptations of “Howl” . “‘Howl’ is considered one of the most important poems of American literature and stands as an iconic work of the 1950’s. Can its famous first line be translated into a different context entirely by using fictional texts from another period? What does the GPT-2 model (a large language model originally developed by Open-AI) mark as the identifying features of the first line of ‘Howl’ and what does that tell us about the GPT-2 model’s knowledge of literary texts? For this occasion, we retrained the small-size GPT-2 model (originally developed by Open-AI) to generate alternate ways to complete the text ‘I saw the best minds of my generation…’ in the style of different authors or characters, with the result as a text or an image.” Sweet Valley High! Star Wars!

Library of Congress: Celebrate Native American Heritage Month with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and New Resources from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress: Celebrate Native American Heritage Month with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and New Resources from the Library of Congress. “‘Living Nations, Living Words’ is Harjo’s signature project as U.S. Poet Laureate. With an emphasis on poetry, and sharing and elevating the voices of living Native poets, the project consists of two main components: a story map and a poetry collection. Together, they present works by 47 Native poets that explore the themes of place and displacement, as well as the ‘touchpoints’ of persistence, resistance, acknowledgment and visibility.”