The Black Bibliography Project is a digital humanities initiative that seeks to revitalize the practice of descriptive bibliography in African American literary studies. It is hosted between Rutgers and Yale; I have been on the Rutgers team of graduate fellows since 2023.
The majority of my work for the BBP has been to gather bibliographical data from Black books across the Eastern seaboard and to enter that information in linked data format in the project database.
In the spring of 2026, the BBP hosted a conference at Rutgers to gauge its progress and launch its next phase, which will eventually culminate in the public launch of the database for use by researchers and readers. It was not just a convivial occasion but for me an opportunity to bring the sometimes separate threads of my various projects together: I presented a paper on Amiri Baraka that drew from my dissertation and my bibliographical training alike; I also led a hands-on letterpress workshop in which conference attendees got their hands inky in the printing of a broadside commemorating the occasion.
I have also published a blog post on the tricks that reprints and later editions try to pull as part of the project’s “Field Notes from the Archive” series.