On Excavation #001

Lined notebook page with handwritten checklist of names of Caribbean women writers, their birth years, and countries of origin

On Excavation is a series of field notes and reflections on archival finds in roughly 200 words

Similar to my writing practice, the labor that goes into curating content for Black Women Writers Archive and blackwomenwritersproject.com is often invisible and solitary in nature. The intent of this series is not so much to romanticize this process but to provide a closer look into how the sausage gets made. All the joys, delights, and a few disappointments.

A recent (failed) fact-finding mission left me feeling defeated. My research typically begins with analog items–anthologies, bibliographies, academic criticism. I came across Caribbean Women Writers, in my local public library and used it as a jumping-off point for another round of additions to the Archive Finder. One of the shortcomings of being mostly monolingual (there’s quite a bit of German still bopping around in my head) is that it’s difficult to find archives from the non-Anglophone world. Even though many of the writers in this collection are from English-speaking countries, identifying their archival collections can sometimes be equally as hard. Sadly, I could not identify an institutional archive for most of the writers in the collection. I’m not giving up. There are many more resources to be explored. Our list is 200+ and growing. That keeps me hopeful and focused on the work that remains within reach. // 206. kbf.