LET ME RECOUNT THE WAYS: DOCUMENTING THE POETRY COMMUNITY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

In 2006, the Special Collections Research Center at The George Washington University launched a project to collect the papers of Washington, D.C. area poets for the Washington Writers' Archive (WWA). The goal of the WWA is to discover and explore the ways individual writers' personal papers and their literary organizations' records intersect to tell the story of the Washington literary community. As the work began, a tension between the inclusive nature of a community history and the exclusive nature of a literary collection became evident. This case study describes and analyzes the tasks associated with collecting the historical record of a literary community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]