Laura Helton

Books Not Bars 2025 Holiday Campaign BOOKS NOT BARS FOR THE HOLIDAYS Haymarket Books is committed to making our books available for free to people who are incarcerated. In an effort to support those inside who are dealing with the imm...

Help us send 2,000 books to readers who are incarcerated this winter through our Books Not Bars program

My big news: coming May 19 from @scribnerbooks.bsky.social the book I always knew I would have to write. More info and pre-order links here:

www.simonandschuster.com/books/Keeper...

On Monday, December 1, Columbia University Press will be selling all books at 50% off! (And some books at 70%!) tinyurl.com/7wzhyfmv @columbiaup.bsky.social

I used to handle interlibrary loans for a public library. ILL is a magnificent expression of the idea that readers deserve books, and books deserve readers. It’s libraries everywhere pooling their resources for the benefit of everyone.

Killing IMLS could have killed ILL.

This is great news. 📚

Drawing of a 19th century printing press with a selfie of my face transposed on top of the printer's head

Well, it's official. Second printing of "The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities" is sold out. Next printing in Jan! Will post will sales or live, or sign up here:

www.wehere.space/we-here-pres...

Pleased to announce the Wheatley Census is ready for 1.0 public release! As detailed a census as possible (right now) of the first six editions - those printed in the 18th century - of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, is available here: www.wheatleycensus.org.

Hey, remember this? The job posting for a digital archivist to do this work is now up!

Position: CLIR Project Digital Archivist
Location: Toronto (90% on-site)
Salary: $60,000 + health benefits
Deadline to apply: 2 December 2025

More info:

🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🌈🗃️

Zohran's Promise - Dissent Magazine The Mamdani campaign extended the arena of political participation to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward will be sustaining faith in the idea that the c...

New online: Nikhil Pal Singh on Zohran Mamdani. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

People still matter.

Good morning.

New York, NY: Curator, Moving Image & Recorded Sound, Schomburg Center at New York Public Library

Maybe the thing that gives me a pulse-pounding throbbing headache is when I think of how techbros sold ChatGPT to universities as ‘revolutionizing’ higher education and our institutions just forked over money without even asking for actual evidence

When I visited @lehelton.bsky.social's seminar. Every student had a copy of the book, and most of them were heeeaaaavvily annotated. Now some of it was just them being a good cohort, but one of the first questions was about the materiality. I just don't think a PDF would have had that reaction

Readers! Writers! Archivists! Keepers of things! You’ll want to read this book! THE HOUSE ARCHIVES BUILT by @dorothyjberry.bsky.social. 1st printing sold out fast, but you can put your name on this list @wehere.bsky.social to find out as soon as the 2nd run is ready: www.wehere.space/newsletter

I’m sorry to have to miss the @moderniststudies.bsky.social convening this year, but I’m incredibly honored to be in such good company on this shortlist for the 2025 MSA First Book Prize!

Dorothy seated at a restaurant table signing books with plants to her right and a painting behind her.

GET YOUR CALENDAR OUT 🗓️ and write these two dates down…

10/16, 2p ET USA: Dorothy Berry’s (@dorothyjberry.bsky.social) The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities available for purchase. The first 50 copies sold will be signed 🫢 www.weherepress.org

My reading list just got much longer . . .

We call for the immediate rejection of the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”...No institution that is committed to the free pursuit of knowledge should submit to the degradation of autonomy and academic freedom contained in it. -ACLS Statement Regarding White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”

ACLS has released a statement regarding the White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”: bit.ly/3IviMig

ACLS Statement Regarding White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” ACLS stands firmly against this latest White House effort to divide faculties by giving special privileges to students in “hard science programs” and its demand that institutions abolish “units that p...

"No institution that is committed to the free pursuit of knowledge should submit to the degradation of autonomy and academic freedom contained in it." @acls1919.bsky.social statement on the White House "compact" proposed to universities. www.acls.org/news/acls-st...

This is real.

YouTube video by Merriam-Webster LLM

Yall please go watch @merriam-webster.com’s new AI ad😅

youtu.be/RvQnl3O0D3c?...

Important thread on what came out in the AAUP vs. Rubio case.

Bibliographical Mysteries! "Share your successes and failures, cold cases, breakthroughs, speculative practices, novel uses of technology, collaborative momentum, and other stories."
CFP *by 10.7* for a special session of @bibsocamer.bsky.social annual meeting. bibsocamer.org/news/cfp-bsa26

Happy 195th birthday to the Colored Conventions movement!

The first convention debated whether this country would ever be a place for Black people to enjoy their full civil rights and citizenship. As those fights continue today, it is powerful reading omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/70

Photograph of copies of Essential Poems by Pat Parker on a box. The cover is purple with a photograph of Pat Parker, wearing a deep v neck shirt, glasses, and rocking a small fro.

Next month a new collection of Pat Parker’s crucial work—edited by yours truly—will be published. Essential Poems by Pat Parker features some of her most beloved writing. Available wherever you buy books. Still feeling so chuffed after receiving my copies!!!

'Instead, the trans past can be a tool for imagining how we might build liveable trans lives in community, outside of and without reference to the state and other institutions— and perhaps even in the face of, and in active resistance to, state violence and repression.'

Weaving Dreams Exhibition Opening | Barnard Library

🚨I've been timid to announce the exhibition "Weaving Dreams" which centers my #quilts as well as work by my Mom and alumna Carter Watson. The opening on 10/3 features an excerpt of the choreopoem, PURPLE, by SLMDances w/a talkback. Pls RSVP by 9/29 library.barnard.edu/events/weavi...

Wary of changes under Trump, 'citizen historians' are documenting the Smithsonian Historians and citizens who say they are concerned about the Trump administration's pressure on the Smithsonian are working to document exhibits, as they exist today, throughout the museum network.

‘Citizen historians' are documenting the Smithsonian to track historical erasure over time. www.capeandislands.org/2025-09-22/w... If you visit the Smithsonian, particularly the NMAAHC, take and share pictures.

The concurrence relegates the interests of U. S. citizens and individuals with legal status to a single sentence, positing that the Government will free these individuals as soon as they show they are legally in the United States. Ante, at 8 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.). That blinks reality. Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens; one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back, and the other was taken away from his job to a warehouse for further questioning. More fundamentally, it is the Government’s burden to prove that it has reasonable suspicion to stop someone. The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely. The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

Black headline text on a purple background with information about an article in a recent issue of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, with an image of the cover of the book reviewed situated on a black field.

Black text on a purple background. Quote from the book review with information about the reviewer at the bottom.

📝Reviewed in PBSA: Laura E. Helton's book, Scattered and Fugitive Things 📖

Read Melissa Barton's full review in the June 2025 issue of PBSA. Link in Bio 🔗

🔎 DOI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/735894

#BookReview #Bibliography