The Library of Congress holds the largest number of Walt Whitman materials in the world, and has been actively digitizing these collections for the use and enjoyment of scholars, artists, and the general public. Join Library of Congress Historian and Curator Barbara Bair, writer and journalist Wally Suphap and Whitman Initiative President Karen Karbiener for an exploration of the Library of Congress’ rich digital resources on Whitman’s life, work, and legacy. Bair will lead a discussion on Whitman’s important “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” notebook and discuss an assignment (given by Karbiener and completed by Suphap) designed to inspire fresh insights on the poem as well as Whitman’s creative process.

Barbara Bair works in collaborative projects in digital humanities, exhibitions, and outreach as a historian at the Library of Congress, where she curates collections in Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division. She has taught Whitman in American Studies courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Brown University.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman and curated several exhibitions focused on the poet. In 2019, she was the co-curator with collector Susan Tane of Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman, an exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club (May 15 – July 27), and is the author of a book based on the exhibition (Grolier Club, 2019).

Wally Suphap is a writer, lawyer, journalist, community organizer, and queer rights advocate based in New York City. Recognized by the Financial Times and Yahoo! Finance as a Global Top 5 OUTstanding LGBT+ Future Leader in 2018 and 2019, Wally has 15 years of experience in the legal and finance industry in New York and Hong Kong. He is currently following his passion by pursuing creative writing and literature studies at Columbia University. His recent piece—a personal essay entitled “I Sit and Look Out”—traces his two-decades-long relationship with a lesser-known Walt Whitman poem across time and space, inspired and bookended by two literature seminars taught by Karen Karbiener.