Michael Hennessey on The Elliston Project

The University of Cincinnati houses an impressive array of recordings from its reading series, dating back to the 1950s. Though many were in the form of records or audio cassettes, a grant a few years ago allowed us to digitize the entire collection—now available online, for free.

This project is called The Elliston Project in honor of George Elliston, whose donation to the Department of English & Comparative Literature has funded many different poetry initiatives over the decades, including a dedicated room to poetry in Langsam Library and an endowed Poet in Residence position, held by the top poets of their day—including Robert Frost, whose November 1954 reading is available here.

We hope to feature more about The Elliston Project in the coming months (follow it on Twitter!), but we’re lucky to have an expert on it, Michael Hennessey, to explain more about what it is.

Hennessey is an editor at PennSound and Jacket2. An instructor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature here at UC, he’s an expert on sound and media in poetry. We’re lucky to have him!