Kim Roberts is the editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), as well as five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017). A sixth book of poems, Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere, is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2023. She is the founding editor of the literary journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Roberts is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and Humanities DC, and has been awarded writer’s residencies from eighteen artist colonies. Her website: www.kimroberts.org.
Dan Vera is the co-editor of Imaniman: Poets Writing In The Anzaldúan Borderlands and author of two books of poetry, Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen Press, 2013), and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008). A CantoMundo and Macondo writing fellow, he’s the winner of the Oscar Wilde Award for Poetry and the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He’s recieved grants and fellowships from the DC Commission of the Arts & Humanities, the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work is featured in college and university curricula and various journals and anthologies including Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology. The Traveler’s Made Mecum, and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South. He is the former board chair of Split This Rock, and a former board member of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). His website: www.danvera.com
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Press Coverage
The Georgetowner featured the literary research of Kim Roberts in March 2022, saying:
Roberts “has done perhaps more than anyone to document famous and important women authors who’ve lived in Georgetown and the nation’s capital.”
https://georgetowner.com/articles/2022/03/07/mapping-georgetown-8/
WDVM-TV reported in September 2020:
“A pair of friends and literary historians have spent many years compiling a database, called DC Writers’ Homes, that documents a forgotten piece of the District’s history. What started as a decade-long ‘strange hobby,’ has morphed into an impressive database. ‘We wanted people to feel proud of that history which otherwise we thought would get lost,’ said co-founder Kim Roberts. https://www.localdvm.com/news/washington-dc/take-a-self-guided-tour-of-the-dmvs-late-writers-homes/
A review in the Washington City Paper in August 2020 states:
“From Zora Neale Hurston to Elizabeth Bishop, an online database of more than 300 writers and their D.C. homes offers a glittering who’s who of Washington literary history. Finesse your explorations using mysterious and glamorous search terms like “genre: romance,” “showbiz,” “society hostesses,” and even “spies & their families” (where you’ll find Julia Child and her lemon meringue-colored Georgetown home). There’s an admirable category for “hosts of literary salons,” where generous intelligentsia like Hilary Tham will invite you into their homes. Tham immigrated from Malaysia to Virginia in 1971 at the age of 25, and was the poetry editor of the Potomac Review while living in her Arlington nook. Under “architecturally significant” homes, you’ll find iconic Logan Circle outposts like the home of Gil Scott-Heron. (The house, incidentally, was built by a former White House tenant and son of a president). Three miles up Connecticut Avenue is the country home-turned-Georgian mansion of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman to hold a cabinet position in India. She gathered materials for her memoir from her Cleveland Park residence while serving as ambassador to America in 1949. Then there’s the 12th Street YMCA, as it was known, a Renaissance Revival fortress designed by William Sidney Pittman, a trailblazing Black architect (and son-in-law of Booker T. Washington), where Langston Hughes wrote immortal lines.” https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/article/21143289/city-lights-pass-the-time-in-quarantine-waiting-for-salvation-or-virtually-tour-dc-writers-homes
Kim was interviewed by Matthew Gilmore in December 2018. https://matthewbgilmore.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/kim-roberts-interview-with-a-d-c-website-creator-dc-writers-homes/