2008 Woodie Awards
Website Highlights City's Rich Literary History
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From Staff Reports
Baltimore, a city with a highly regarded literary history that has inspired authors for over two centuries, now has its own website for that history: http://baltimoreauthors.ubalt.edu. The Baltimore Literary Heritage Project is an ongoing effort by the University of Baltimore's School of Communications Design. The goal of the project is to be a clearinghouse of information about Baltimore writers going back more than 200 years.
According to project director Jonathan Shorr, director of the School of Communications Design, Baltimore is not unlike other American cities that have rich literary histories: people know bits and pieces, but little has been done to bring together these figures in a concise, informative manner.
"I think a lot of people who come to Baltimore would be very interested in knowing more about Baltimore's writers, driving around and seeing where they lived, the streets and sites they wrote about, their graves," Shorr said. "I think it's one of the things that could attract people to visit Baltimore."
Shorr said he was inspired to bring students and educators into the project last fall when his sister, a freelance writer for The Boston Globe, was looking into Baltimore's literary history and finding little comprehensive information on the Web.
The project began modestly, with a team of five student researchers, writers and designers gathering information and setting up the website. The group and their work were guided by Shorr and other UB faculty members.
Shorr said the project's standards for inclusion are relatively straightforward: the person has to have lived in Baltimore and produced works of literature, fiction or nonfiction. The authors included in the project are either dead or are well-established and no longer living in the area. This, Shorr said, eliminates the politically and socially sensitive issue of determining which of Baltimore's many current writers will or will not be included.
Now that the website is up and running, the next step, according to Shorr, is to market it to libraries, local schools, visitors' and convention bureaus, and travel agents.
"Not many cities can say they have inspired writers as different as John Dos Passos and John Waters," he said.
And while it is tempting to use the list to try to define "Baltimore writing," Shorr noted that that is beyond the scope of the project—at least for now.
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