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    • Nov 25, 2020

YPEI Collaborates with Beinecke Library's Collection of American Literature

An exciting collaboration was born this summer when Melissa Barton and Nancy Kuhl, curators of the Yale Collection of American Literature at Beinecke Library (YCAL), guest-edited a unit of YPEI's Creative Writing Workshop for YPEI students that explored archival treasures of the YCAL. We are pleased to announce that this collection is now publicly available here.


In the new YCAL series "Creativity in 2020" writers and artists have been invited to share what they have been thinking about, working on, and reading in 2020, exploring creativity in quarantine, in isolation, in grief, in action, in disruption.


This week's entry features the response of an incarcerated YPEI student, Justin, who wrote a poem inspired by the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade Photographs by Johnson and Johnson (pictured), stewarded by the Beinecke in the personal papers of James Weldon Johnson and his wife, Grace Nail Johnson. His poem, "History in Motion," is a rich and urgent layering of past and present.


We invite you to take a look at Justin's writing and explore this collaboration at the links below:










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