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Library of Congress Poetry & Literature
The Library of Congress promotes poetry and literature year-round through our online and in-person programs, our honors and prizes, and our ambassadors.
The National Humanities Center is unique: a free standing national resource devoted to advancing significant humanistic study and reflection and to making those insights available both inside and outside the academic world.
Founded in 1970 to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.
The National Book Foundation was founded in 1989 to administer the National Book Awards, which has been one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the country since 1950. The Foundation also produces numerous educational and public programs that help connect readers to books in new and meaningful ways.
The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop—my first—while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid’s story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to “take cover” and then performing several combat rolls to do so.
“You’re college students,” the professor said. “Write about college students.”
Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that’s always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word “research” in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: “This desperately needs more research,” we’d all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We’d all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.
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