One of P4's primary ambitions is to enter into a long term partnership agreement with an academic repository, such as a College or University Library, for the perpetual storage and preservation of our archive of slam poetry recordings and historical documents.  We're pleased to announce that we have taken a big step in that direction in recent weeks.

In mid-November 2016, P4's Executive Director Wess Mongo Jolley, along with President Tom Bouliane and Board member Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, met in Austin to assess our readiness to begin conversations with academic repositories.  The three of us met with Kurt Heinzelman--a long time friend of P4 with insight into the inner workings of academia and historical archives.  Based on those discussions, we all feel P4 is ready to take our materials catalog public, and begin to assess which library or other academic repository will meet our needs.

In the coming months, we'll be shifting our focus toward doing additional outreach, with a goal of filling in the gaps in our collection.  We'll also be bringing our "behind the scenes" materials catalog out for public view here on this website, so everyone can browse and explore the various materials we already have.  The goal of this effort will be to prepare us for those conversations with archivists and librarians, and give us the tools we need to clearly illustrate the depth and value of our collection.

This is a hugely important step for P4, and we're excited about the possibilities.  And for those of you reading this blog entry, the exciting part will probaby be that we'll finally have more detailed information about our holdings available for public view.  As soon as that happens, poets can check to see what materials we have already in our collection, and hopefully help us fill in those gaps.  

Exciting times!!!  Stay tuned for more news, very soon!