Description
The Carol Muske-Dukes papers consist of the literary works, academic files, and personal papers, photographs, and correspondence
of Carol Muske-Dukes, California poet laureate and USC professor of creative writing. The materials cover the period from
early 1957 to 2023.
Background
Carol Muske-Dukes is a writer and educator, whose body of work stretches from the 1970s forward and whose achievements as
an educator include the founding of two creative writing programs--one for inmates of New York area prisons and the other,
a PhD. program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California (USC). Muske-Dukes, an accomplished
poet, novelist, and essayist, has won a number of different awards, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society
of America), the Witter Bynner Award (Library of Congress), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. While Muske-Dukes' career in education includes a number of notable positions, including
brief stints at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, University of California at Irvine, and the Writing
Division at Columbia University, her most notable achievements include the establishment of the aforementioned doctoral program
in Literature and Creative Writing at USC and Free Space/Art Without Walls. What is distinctive about Muske-Dukes as both
an artist and educator--though it is perhaps false to draw a line between the two--involves the blurring or challenging of
conventional boundaries: the boundary between art and science (as evident in her novel Saving St. Germ), the boundary between
"high" culture that the academic world can embody and the street culture which may be attributed to the incarcerated, and
between established themes that have marked the tradition of Western literature and the more politically charged themes that
may be seen as less transcendent in nature.
Extent
55.02 Linear Feet
111 boxes
Restrictions
All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Manuscripts Librarian.
Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended
to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.
Availability
Advance notice required for access.