For over two decades, the Creative Writing Program has partnered with the Painting Program in the College of Fine Arts to pair first-year painting students with poetry students with the mission of each duo being to create an “Artist’s Book” featuring the writing of the poet and the art of the painter. Here, “book” can be interpreted quite literally (many beautiful, bound books — including, in recent memory, one bound in a rabbit pelt and another stitched onto chiffon) or abstractly (past projects have included a miniature sculpture of a refrigerator with a poem affixed to the front with a magnet, blocks of mud from the Charles River cast with the words of one of our alumni, and poems painted on living models). This project culminates each year in the Painters/Poets Project Exhibition, a one-night event at which the pairs show off their collaboration, reading a poem or two and allowing the audience to examine the physical objects that they’ve created.
