Talking back: bringing Beat counterculture into the modern era through dance

Author William S. Burroughs said, “In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.” Burroughs was certainly the former. He was a lifelong heroin addict, who wrote explicitly and affectionately of his drug use. He was openly queer at a time in American history when you could be arrested simply for Read More …

Picturing a Photographer’s Atlanta: MARBL Acquires the Alli Royce Soble Photograph Albums

Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library recently acquired twenty-four photograph albums from Atlanta artist Alli Royce Soble. Soble (b.1973) earned her BFA in photography from Georgia State University in 1998. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows throughout Atlanta, including shows at Nexus (now the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center), The Read More …

The Personal Journey of Brownie Broadway

In 1990, on the occasion of playwright Rebecca Ranson‘s forty-seventh birthday, the writer and poet delivered a public performance in Atlanta while in character as her alter ego, Brownie Broadway. The dialogue, performed with call-and-response audience participation, recounted the most important experiences in the playwright’s life, including her pregnancy at age seventeen, her first marriage Read More …

Struggle Against Disease and Discrimination: The Jesse Peel Papers

MARBL is pairing with Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published in collaboration with the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University, to publish short features on MARBL collections, events, and exhibits that tell the history of spaces and places in the US South. These posts investigate the geographical, historical, and cultural study of Read More …

Conditions: A Magazine of Writing by Women With an Emphasis on Writing by Lesbians

  MARBL is honored to add Conditions: a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians to our holdings. Conditions comes to MARBL through a generous gift made possible by Professor Cheryl Clarke of Rutgers University and Julie Enszer of the University of Maryland. First published in 1977, the magazine spans Read More …