Welcome to Fall everyone!

Many of you likely noticed that P4 scaled back our operations significantly over the summer.  Several members of our Board had huge life transitions this summer (including one wedding, and one move out of the country!), so it made sense for us to take a bit of a hiatus.

But we're back with the fall, brimming with more energy than ever!  We're thrilled to be taking the collection and preservation of the poetry slam movement to the next level in 2018, and we'd like to start by sharing some very exciting news:

For many years (close to a decade now!) P4 has been building our infrastructure and collection with one hugely important goal in mind:  A collaborative relationship with a Repository Institution, which would be the eventual home for our content, both physical and digital.  We knew from the beginning that we could never have the resources of a big academic library, and if we wanted to ensure the long-term preservation of our materials, having a Repository Partner would be key.

I'm thrilled to announce that early in 2017, we found our partner!

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the Performance Poetry Preservation Project signed a Deed of Gift this spring, and we have now transferred all the physical holdings of our collection to their care.  The collection is now housed in the Rauner Special Collections Library at the College, where it will be under the care of professional librarians and archivists.

We at P4 couldn't be more thrilled with this partnership.  Dartmouth College is a hugely respected Ivy League institution, with a long history and an impressive commitment to their library.  The staff at Rauner was already very excited about the poetry slam movement (having acquired the papers of alumnus Jack McCarthy in 2016).  With the acquisition of  the P4 Collection, Dartmouth is now positioned to become one of the most important resources for poetry slam teaching and research in the world.

As part of our continuing relationship with Dartmouth, P4 will be actively enlarging and building our collection in the coming years.  We will continue to acquire new materials, catalog and arrange those materials, and transfer them to the care of the professionals at Rauner Library.  Over time, we will be working with Dartmouth on strategies to digitize large portions of our content, and make it available to scholars, researchers, students, and the general public.

I'd like to extend a special thanks to Peter Carini and Jay Satterfield of Dartmouth Library, the entire Board of P4, and all of our supporters, without whom this huge leap forward in our work would not have been possible.

Onward!!!!

--Wess Mongo Jolley, President
The Performance Poetry Preservation Project