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PAST NEWS ARCHIVE
November 14, 2001
Contact: Patricia Fraga, Austin Public Library, (512) 974-7528
Fax: (512) 974-7442

Austin Public Library will be hosting a special event titled I Hear America Singing: American Poets, a free program discussing American poetry from the beginning to the present. Some of the poets featured will be Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and others. The program features readers from the Past Poetry Project, an Austin group that has held numerous programs and readings at several branches across the City. The program will be held on Tuesday, November 20, at 7:00 p.m. on the first floor of the Faulk Central Library, 800 Guadalupe.

This program is made possible by a major gift awarded to the Library through a national competition titled The Millennium Project for Public Libraries. Through this project, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Library received a 50-volume Great American writing collection and funding to develop this program introducing the collection to the community. The collection is published by The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to preserving the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writings in durable and authoritative editions. The retail value of the collection is nearly $1,800.

The 50 volumes span three centuries of notable American writing, including works of Robert Frost, Henry James, James Madison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and others, and collections of 19th and 20th century American poetry and American journalism from World War II and the Vietnam War.

The Millennium Project is a partnership of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The Library of America (LOA), and the American Library Association (ALA).

For more information, contact the Austin Public Library Telephone Information Center at (512) 974-7400. Or visit the APL Web site at http://www.cityofaustin.org/library/.

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