Poets House and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative are proud to award the inaugural Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellowships to CUNY doctoral students Jessica Fletcher and Sarah Ruth Jacobs as part of Poets House’s new initiative to digitize rare chapbooks. The fellowship is for students working at the intersection of mid-century poetics, small press publishing, book arts, the digital humanities, and archival scholarship. The Fellowship provides an opportunity to help contextualize Poets House’s digitized chapbooks, which will be launched to the Poets House website beginning in fall 2017, making the organization’s 70,000-volume poetry library and vast chapbook collection more accessible.
The Poets House chapbook digitization project grew out of a Poets House exhibition curated by previous Lost & Found fellows Meira Levinson and Kyle Waugh. Based on the exhibition, the digitization project explores the Mimeo Revolution, a period from the 1960s to the early 1980s, when small press publishing proliferated.
Poets House is a 70,000-volume poetry library, literary center, and meeting place that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. Each year, Poets House presents hundreds of programs for adults, children and youth at its Lower Manhattan home—offering a library reading room, program hall, exhibition space, and children’s room—as well as outreach programs nationwide in library systems, zoos and museums.
