The following is a guest post by National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson. This is the first in a series of bimonthly blog posts that Kara will be writing during her laureateship this year. Poets give language to everything. In a poet’s mind, there’s a word for each phase of a fruit; a word for …
Today is one of the biggest days of the year for the Poetry and Literature Center—it’s the day of the Poet Laureate announcement. I want to say how honored and excited we at the Center—and throughout the Library of Congress—are that Joy Harjo will be our 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Today’s announcement has been …
Exciting news: The Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Regional program has just awarded a $20,000 grant to the Academy of American Poets to support the addition of resources from the Library’s collections to the Academy’s Teach This Poem series for the 2019-2020 school year. In celebration of this news, I asked Academy of American …
Yesterday, the Library of Congress celebrated Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday with a public open house in the Thomas Jefferson Building. From 2:30 to 5:00, the room buzzed with energy as Library staff showed off a host of rarely seen Whitman collection items from the Manuscript, Rare Book and Special Collections, Prints and Photographs, and Music …
The following guest post is by Abby Yochelson, Reference Specialist in the Main Reading Room, Researcher & Reference Services Division. The Library of Congress will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birthday in spring 2019 with a series of exhibits, public programs, and a digital crowdsourcing campaign to showcase the Library’s unparalleled collections of Whitman’s writings …
The following guest post is by Sasha Dowdy, program specialist in the Library’s Young Readers Center. To have great poets, there must be great audiences. So said Walt Whitman, the famous 19th century American poet born on this day in 1819. And most would say Whitman became that great poet with even greater audiences: Whitman …
The following guest post is by Anne McLean, Senior Producer for Concerts and Special Projects in the Library’s Music Division. Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the …
The following guest post, part of our “Teacher’s Corner” series, is by Rebecca Newland, a Fairfax County Public Schools Librarian and former Teacher in Residence at the Library of Congress. At this time of the school year, many of us are preparing to send our students to the next grade level, the next school, or …
The following is a guest post by Rachel Habtemariam, who completed a 2018-19 academic year internship at the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center last week. The Poetry and Literature Center came into my life at a time when I had been feeling a bit lost. I was coming close to the start of my …