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David Kipen is pretty sure the idea for a modern-day Federal Writers Project came to him at dawn.
It was early in the devastating spring of 2020 and the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts
was thinking of his friends who’d died of COVID-19, a handful of the more than 578,000 people killed by the virus in the United States to date. He was thinking of his brilliant creative writing students at UCLA, deprived of internships and jobs. Of decimated small-town newspapers and fellow writers who’d been laid off. And he was thinking of the cosmic rifts dividing the nation.
The Atlantic
It’s time for a new Federal Writers’ Project.
11:38 AM ET
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In its $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, the Biden administration seeks to expand the public’s conception of what is and is not infrastructure. It is right to do so. Infrastructure is not just the bridge we drive across; it is the home health aides who look after our parents and grandparents. Infrastructure is not simply the train we ride, but also the day care where we drop our children off before heading to work. Democrats are in a position to expand that definition even further. The United States should improve its physical infrastructure and support the human infrastructure that sustains our society but it should also build up America’s historical infrastructure. It should create a new Federal Writers’ Project.
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RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Between 1821 and 1865, thousands of enslaved African Americans crossed the Rio Grande to seek a different future; however, their stories and of those who aided them, remained buried in obscurity until recently.
“In Mexico you could be free. They didn’t care what color your skin was”. (Photo internet reproduction)
Unlike the so-called “Underground Railroad” – the network organized by abolitionists in the 19th century to help slaves escape to northern states and Canada – the history of which is taught to high school students in the US – the route south has remained ignored on both sides of the Rio Grande.
proposals due April 5, 2021
In her 1942 autobiographical work, Dust Tracks on a Road, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston openly declared her desire to expand the focus and direction of African-American literature, indicating not only that “I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject [of the race problem in the United States]” but that she was interested in exploring “what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color” (713). And while discussions of race inherently pervade much of her work, this artistic and ideological perspective the need to “tell a story the way I wanted, or rather the way the story told itself to me” (713) played a significant role in shaping Hurston’s literary works throughout her storied career. Whether it was using dialect to construct the African-American voice in text, driving down the coast collecting stories from Black folk whose voices had long been ignored, or delving into the lives of a white married couple in