“Democratic Vistas:” Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library

A helpful guide to the exhibition in pdf format. The exhibition runs through May 26 in the Schatten Gallery, Level 3, Robert W. Woodruff Library.

“A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry,” April 2-4, 2008 in Woodruff Library

Some of the country’s finest poets, including two former U.S. poet laureates will gather at Emory April 2-4, 2008 to celebrate "A Fine Excess".

Dana Gioia, poet and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, will open the celebration, which will include poetry readings by the distinguished American poets Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand and W.D. Snodgrass. The three-day program will include readings by 10 additional poets, including readings by the 2005 and 2006 winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Morri Creech and Erica Dawson. The Hecht Prize, named for the late Pulitzer prize-winner, is awarded each year to recognize the best first or second collection of poems.

“It was John Keats who wrote that poetry should please by a fine excess, a message that Emory has taken to heart in organizing this rich program,” says Steve Enniss, Director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Enniss is co-organizer of the program with Philip Hoy publisher of The Waywiser Press.

In addition to more than 10 readings over the three days, the celebration will also include interviews with Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand and W.D. Snodgrass, and two exhibitions that highlight Emory University’s extensive poetry collections.

Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library is curated by Kevin Young, Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, and draws on the 75,000-volume Danowski collection of English language poetry, donated to Emory in 2003. This exhibition, accompanied by a published catalog, includes rare editions of some of the 20th century’s most important works of poetry, ranging literally from A-Z, from W.H. Auden to Louis Zukofsky.

A companion exhibition, curated by Jennifer Brady, Visions and Revisions: An Exhibition of Poems in Process, traces the creative process through 16 sets of manuscript drafts including the worksheets of Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Natasha Trethewey.

Poets participating in the celebration include: Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Jeff Harrison, Joseph Harrison, J.D. McClatchy, Eric McHenry, Mary Jo Salter, W. D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, Deborah Warren, Clive Watkins, Richard Wilbur and Greg Williamson.

“A Fine Excess” is sponsored by the Emory Libraries; The Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; Emory’s Creativity and the Arts Initiative; The Waywiser Press; Emory's Creative Writing Program, Humanities Council and English Department; with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The three-day celebration is free and open to the public. For more information or to register to attend, visit http://marbl.library.emory.edu/excess_intro.html.

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Alice Walker Places Her Archive at Emory

Dr. Steve Enniss, director of Emory’s Manuscript Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory professor Rudolph Byrd, and Spelman professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall, celebrate the arrival of Alice Walker’s archives.

"I chose Emory to receive my archive because I myself feel at ease and comfortable at Emory," said Walker. "I can imagine in years to come that my papers, my journals and letters will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do: culture, community, spirituality, scholarship and the blessings of ancestors who want each of us to find joy and happiness in this life by doing the very best we can to be worthy of it."

Walker, who has visited Emory almost every other year since 1998 for readings or to interact with colleagues, said that when she first began considering where to place her archive, Emory was not on her list. "However, having visited several libraries at different universities, I realized the importance to me of a lively, diverse, committed-to-human-growth atmosphere, that when I visited Emory, I found."

The completeness of Walker's archive makes it truly exceptional, says Rudolph Byrd, professor of American studies and a founding member of the Alice Walker Literary Society, an international organization of Walker scholars and enthusiasts.
" The archive contains journals that she has been keeping since she was 14 or 15 years old," said Byrd, who also is a friend and colleague of Walker's. "There also are drafts of many of her early works of fiction, as well as the back and forth between Alice and the editors for each book.

"Her papers give you a sense of the process for creating fiction, and for creating poetry," Byrd said. "Everything that she's ever written, she has a record of – it's very exciting."

"The Alice Walker Archive will provide a major bridge in the university's collections on African-American literature, history and culture," said Steve Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. "Walker is one of Georgia’s most beloved writers, and it is particularly gratifying that she has chosen to return her archive to the state where she was born, to the city where she attended college as an undergraduate, and to Emory which has, in the intervening years, become a major research center in literary studies.”

Emory's African-American literary collections include significant collections related to the Harlem Renaissance novelists and poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and the papers of the Georgia-born novelist John Oliver Killens. The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch collection of African-American performing arts materials includes hundreds of playscripts including works by Zora Neale Hurston and August Wilson, among many others.

Walker's literary archive at Emory joins a world-class repository of some of the finest collections of modern literature; 20th century American, British and Irish poetry; and an extensive collection on the American South. The collection includes the recently acquired archive of Salman Rushdie, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's papers, British poet laureate Ted Hughes' papers, and the 75,000-volume Danowski Poetry Library.

In 1983 Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which honored her novel "The Color Purple." The book depicts oppressive early 20th century life in the South for a young African-American woman named Celie.

Other honors bestowed upon Walker and her writing include the 1983 National Book Award, also for "The Color Purple"; the 1973 Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts for "Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems"; the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters; and Radcliff Institute, Merrill and Guggenheim fellowships.
Faculty, students and visiting scholars from around the world who study Walker's archives at Emory will be within a 90-minute drive to her home in Eatonton, Ga., and within 20 minutes of Spelman College, which she attended for two years.

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Emory Joins Bourgeoning Trend: Graduate School and Libraries Launch Electronic Theses, Dissertations Program

Beginning in Fall 2008, all Emory Universiity graduate students will submit their doctoral dissertations and masters theses in electronic form for the university’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) database. ETD is an online, searchable repository of Emory University graduates’ research. Undergraduates completing honors theses will contribute to the online repository beginning in 2009.

The Graduate School and the Libraries teamed up two years ago to begin developing ETD. Creating such university-wide repositories of student research is a national trend that has been gaining momentum among top research universities for the last decade, says Lisa A. Tedesco, dean of the Graduate School.

“Theses and dissertations are among the most important intellectual works of the university. Sharing them can raise the profile of the university in the United States and abroad,” Tedesco said. “Putting our scholarship online is a strategic way to maximize and extend Emory’s reputation for producing leading-edge research.”

The Emory campus benefits from ETD in numerous other ways, as well. In the past, students and their advisers often waited months after graduation for theses and dissertations to reach library shelves and the Proquest repository. With ETD, many students will find their work online just a few weeks after they leave the Emory campus as graduates. Through ETD, they will find it much easier to include audio, video, computer animation, data sets and other materials with their submissions.

From the Graduate School’s perspective, processing theses and dissertations will become more efficient since the new submission system provides automated management tools for academic tracking. And in the libraries, ETD will free shelf space for storing other materials that are not available digitally, says Rick Luce, vice provost and director of libraries.

“The ETD will be the University’s copy of record of student research, and will be carefully preserved by the libraries,” Luce said. “This will make theses and dissertations more easily accessible, allowing researchers broader and more timely access to Emory scholarship.”

Submitting research for inclusion in ETD is easy, said Paul O’Grady, project manager for the ETD program.

“Students will simply submit their work as a PDF file, along with some basic information about their research,” he said. “This information will be displayed in the ETD repository, and also transmitted to Proquest/UMI for their database.”

O’Grady and other colleagues from the libraries will be holding information and training sessions throughout spring semester and again during fall to prepare students to submit their work, and to introduce staff to the new procedures. Sessions for students will include training from Lisa Macklin, the head of the libraries’ office of Intellectual Property Rights, on copyright, trademark and publishing issues in the digital age. Refer to the ETD website, https://etd.library.emory.edu/, for a list of training classes for students and staff.

The Graduate School offers students choices on access restriction for those who may not want their work available online immediately upon graduation. Basic information on all theses and dissertations will be listed in the ETD index. However, access to full text can be set for immediate release or withheld for one, two or six years following graduation. Research on which patents are pending will be kept out of the repository until the necessary filings are completed.

The ETD program and related software were developed during 2006 with input from faculty members, librarians, university administrators and graduate students. A pilot program began in March 2007 among doctoral students from anthropology, art history, chemistry and epidemiology, with favorable results. The ETD repository is currently home to 30 theses and dissertations, 14 of which are available in full-text form.

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Get "The Library Survival Guide" Podcast for New Tips and Techniques on Library Research

The Library Survival Guide features short audio episodes of 5-10 minutes with tips, tricks, and useful things you don't know about using Woodruff Library. You can brush up your research skills using iTunes or another podcatcher! More.

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“Please Burn All My Letters” The Robert W. Woodruff Library has acquired the correspondence from Ted Hughes, the late-poet laureate of Britain, to his lover Assia Wevill. In one letter in the collection Hughes instructs Wevill to "please burn all my letters," an instruction she obviously did not follow. The surviving correspondence begins in March 1963, continues until 1969 and "offers readers unprecedented access to Hughes' state of mind at a time of crisis in his personal and professional life," says Stephen Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

Wevill is remembered as the woman with whom Hughes began an affair in the summer of 1962 which led to Hughes and his wife, poet Sylvia Plath, separating. After Plath's death in the winter of 1963, Hughes and Wevill struggled to establish a new basis for their life together. Wevill debated whether to leave her own husband, poet David Wevill, and in the years that followed she and Hughes tried a variety of living arrangements, at times living together, sometimes apart. In 1965 Assia gave birth to a daughter, Shura.

Although Wevill often was erroneously described as Hughes' second wife, the couple never married, and in March 1969 Wevill tragically took her life and that of her young daughter in a manner that bore a resemblance to Plath's death.

The correspondence spans the period in Hughes' life when he was writing Gaudete, editing Plath's Ariel for publication, and writing the sequence of poems based on the life of a mythical crow figure. It was during this period that Wevill and Hughes also collaborated on the translation of Yehuda Amichai's Selected Poems (1968).

This intimate correspondence reveals Hughes' struggle to find peace in the years after Plath's death and his sometimes tortured relationship with Wevill. "You'll see that I'll fulfill all my promises eventually," he assures her in one poignant letter. In another, written to Wevill's sister, Celia Chaikin, in the weeks after her death, Hughes confesses that their life together had been complicated by the presence of "old ghosts," but he adds, "Assia was my true wife."

"This correspondence, which joins Ted Hughes' own literary archive already at Emory, further strengthens the library's Hughes holdings and promises to add greatly to our understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century," says Enniss.

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Midnight’s Children is widely regarded as a masterpiece of world literature; in 1993 it was selected as “the Booker of the Bookers,” the best novel published in the twenty-five year history of Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Rushdie is equally well-known, however, for the world-wide uproar that greeted his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, for being condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and for the ensuing debate over freedom of expression that those events prompted. Iran revoked the fatwa on Rushdie’s life in 1998 and he has since then resumed a more public role including serving for the past two years as President of PEN’s American Center where he was a vocal advocate for persecuted writers around the world.

The Rushdie papers include multiple drafts of all of Rushdie’s novels and other writings from Grimus (1975) to Shalimar the Clown (2005), including manuscripts of two unpublished novels and other writings. The papers also contain a large quantity of correspondence with a wide literary circle, materials documenting Rushdie’s life under the fatwa, notebooks and journals maintained since 1973, photographs, and other related personal and literary papers. Once processing is completed, the Salman Rusdie papers will be the primary resource for all subsequent studies of Rushdie’s life and work. More

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Add Us to Your Buddy List! Now You Can Chat with Library Staff via Instant Messaging

The library staff has been chatting away, answering questions and helping fix computer glitches via instant messaging. Library users can send online instant messages to Woodruff Library reference staff to receive library assistance where they need it, when they need it.

To chat with a librarian, users can simply send an IM to EmoryWoodRef. Summer Hours are Monday - Thursday: 1 pm - 8 pm and Friday - Sunday : 1 pm - 5 pm. We are currently configured to accept messages using AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and MSN (MSN username: emorywoodref@hotmail.com).

For more information, please visit the web page at http://web.library.emory.edu/services/ressvcs/IM.htm

Also, the InfoCommons is a new IM service called "AskInfoCommons." AskInfoCommons will allow users to IM our staff for help from the convenience of their computer! The goal is to make asking for help easier, and our intention is to use IM as a tool to better connect with our users.

Right now we're piloting this service on just a few of the InfoCommons computers. These computers have an AskInfoCommons icon which links to the AskInfoCommons webpage at http://web.library.emory.edu/learningcommons/askinfocommons.html.

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Transatlantic Slave Voyages Data to Go Online

"Everyone wants to know where their antecedents came from, and certainly Europeans have been more thoroughly covered by historians," says Eltis. "There are more data on the slave trade than on the free migrant movement simply because the slave trade was a business and people were property, so records were likely to be better. What the database makes possible is the establishment of links between America and Africa in a way that already has been done by historians on Europeans for many years."

In addition to increasing the number of slave trade voyages from the original work by nearly 30 percent, the grant will allow the addition of new information to more than one-third of the voyages already included in the 1999 CD-ROM. The expanded database making its debut on the Internet will include auxiliary materials such as maps, ship logs, and manifests. It also will be presented in a two-tier format: one for professional researchers, another for K-12 students and general audiences. At the end of the two-year project, online researchers also will be able to submit new data to an editorial board for vetting and future inclusion in the database.

In bringing the materials online, "we are thinking about the needs of very different groups of users," says Halbert. "Scholars and researchers in higher education will want to look at specific time periods and generate comparative statistics, charts, graphs and geographic displays of information. K-12 students have much less background knowledge so will need more context to be able to use the material effectively."

At the time of its publication, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database transformed scholarly research in the field. Since then it has become increasingly rare to see publications on the slave trade that do not cite the CD-ROM, and the volume of queries and suggestions its authors receive has increased every year since its publication. The database also appeals to a wide range of academic disciplines and research expertise.

"This resource is more than a capstone to half a century of research," says Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard's DuBois Institute. "It is a way of marrying scholarship with the wide general interest in the slave trade that has developed."

The project is part of Emory Library's MetaScholar Initiative, which focuses on supporting a range of scholarly work with the goal of realizing the possibilities for research and scholarship in the digital age. Through the initiative, Emory is gaining a national reputation as a leader in digital library development. In the past five years, the initiative has received more than $3.6 million in grant support from organizations such as the Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and NEH.

Schatten Gallery

The Schatten Gallery is located on Level 3 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. For more information on Schatten Gallery exhibitions and events, check the Emory Events Calendar, or call 404 727-6861. For exhibition hours, call 404-727-6868.

Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Danowski Poetry Library Exhibition

Saturday, March 15 - Monday, May 26, 2008
Schatten Gallery, Level 3

Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library is curated by Kevin Young, Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, and draws on the 75,000-volume Danowski collection of English language poetry, donated to Emory in 2003. This exhibition, accompanied by a published catalog, includes rare editions of some of the 20th century’s most important works of poetry, ranging literally from A-Z, from W.H. Auden to Louis Zukofsky.

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Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL)

Visions and Revisions: An Exhibition of Poems in Process
January 15 - May 21, 2008

“Visions and Revisions” charts the trajectory of individual poems, beginning at the poet’s desk with notebooks and handwritten drafts and concluding with published volumes and broadsides. By assembling multiple drafts of single poems by celebrated writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, and Natasha Trethewey, this exhibit represents how poetic vision is first conceived, then revised, and eventually realized.

Free and open to the public, contact 404-727-6887 or marbl@emory.edu for more information

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Parking for all events in the Robert W. Woodruff Library is available in the Fishburne Parking Deck on Fishburne Drive. For directions to Emory, please see http://www.emory.edu/WWW/directions.html. See the campus map