Primary Writing small press records and Phyllis Rosenzweig personal correspondence collection

Phyllis Rosenzweig is curator emerita of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden. She has also taught adjunct classes at GWU and the Corcoran College of Art + Design, and organized several exhibitions of contemporary art in D.C. and the Bronx, New York. She affiliates herself with a group of D.C. poets (including Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Peter Inman, Diane Ward, Bernard Welt, and Terence Winch), and a community originally formed around Folio Bookstore and readings organized there by poet Doug Lang in the 1970s. She currently edits Primary Writing Books, devoted to publishing work by D.C. area writers.

Poet Diane Ward (November 9, 1956- ) was born in Washington, DC and attended the Corcoran School of Art. She was initially associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s. She has published more than a dozen works of poetry and been included in numerous anthologies.

Primary Writing was a small press publication devoted to work by contemporary poets in the D.C. area, New York, the West Coast and beyond. Co-edited by Diane Ward and Phyllis Rosenzweig, it consists of 44 issues published between April 1995 and February 2008. The issues varied in format from postcard, to broadside, to stapled booklet, depending on the content of each one, and were mailed to an extended audience of writers and special collection libraries. Three issues of an earlier version of Primary Writing were published by Phyllis Rosenzweig in 1983, 1984, and 1988.