Search

Photos, documents, correspondence, and audio-visual materials created over several years of the Northern Virginia Writing Project.

This collection contains material from the Poetry Jam and first Literary Festival in 1978 and chronicles the annual Literary Festival onwards to the present day. Materials consist of original and digitized brochures, flyers, and promotional documents; schedules; news clippings; photos; and original and digitized video, as available.

The extensive collection documents the life and work of Richmond-born photographer and educator Louis Draper (1935–2002). Manuscript and photographic materials document Draper's experience and work as an African American photographer, including his recognition of his photography as a form of "engaged resistance" that not only bore witness to leaders of the civil rights movement, but also offered a richer and more diverse perspective of African American life than provided by the mainstream media. In 1963, he was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African American photographers, and the collection includes significant materials from the early years of the Kamoinge Workshop and document his perspective on the professional challenges that he and the collective confronted in the process of finding publications that would publish photographs of African Americans made by African Americans. His photographs of significant 20th-century artists, writers, musicians, and performers reflect the wide array of personal connections that Draper made after moving to New York from Richmond, Virginia in 1957. Printed photographs and contact sheets in Draper's archive show a broad view of city life and the everyday interactions between people and also offer a unique vision of African American neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.

This collection contains papers, manuscripts, and some correspondence, research material, interviews, and reviews, of acclaimed novelist and former George Mason University Robinson Professor Vassily Aksyonov.