Announcing the Blackbird Founders Archive
The 43 legacy issues of the Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, in 21 volumes, was migrated by Virginia Commonwealth University to blackbird-archive.vcu.edu on 1/24/2024. This coincided with the publication of a new iteration of the journal staffed by a new editorial team at blackbird.vcu.edu.
A LIFT grant from VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences has provided, for spring 2024, course release from one course for me to be able to work on the Blackbird Founders Archive after university support for the archive was previously dropped. One of my goals this semester is to deal with deprecated Flash content as best I can and to correct other issues of which we are aware. I also hope to reach out to instructors who use legacy Blackbird content in their courses around country and internationally. An ideal, if far reaching, would be to foster a conversation between instructors, and perhaps to offer supplementary teaching materials for select content.
(I taught Silas House’s short story, “Another Country,” in a gen ed class last fall and hope to develop adjacent notes for the story. I am currently teaching Josef Čapek’s Artificial Man, and other texts from the journal as part of my NEXT 240: Artificial Bodies course. From analytics, I can see the likelihood of other texts being assigned to classes when there is a cluster of visitors to one story or poem from one geographic location.)
If you use the journal in your teaching, or would like to, please reach out to me at [email protected]. If you have any urgent questions about the archive content, don’t hesitate to cc your message to my direct email, [email protected].
The Blackbird Founders Archive team is
Mary Flinn, advising co-founding editor Blackbird.
M.A. Keller, co-founding editor
Kurtis Zirkle, lead pagebuilder and coder
Questions about the new journal, starting with v22n1, should go instead to [email protected].
Check back here for announcements and updates.
M.A. Keller
VCU Department of English
Online Editor, Blackbird Founders Archive (v1–21)
21 Years of 21st Century Literature and Art
“shéer plód makes plough down sillion / Shine”