What's left, Al-Mutanabbi Street

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"I am a storyteller. The book form has a rich legacy as a vessel for the sacred and the profane, both honored and destroyed throughout history. My love of text, image, ink, paper, cloth, thread has drawn me to this form. I honor the preciousness of the one of a kind and the democratization of the edition. I am enchanted with the relative ease of multiples, the ephemeral quality of printed matter and the potential for viewer participation and interaction with the storyteller that the touch of a book invites"--Mare Blocker's personal blog (viewed May 19, 2015).

"Katrina Roberts is the author of Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011). She teaches at Whitman College, and lives in Walla Walla, Washington"--The Academy of American Poets website (viewed May 19, 2015).