A Bridge Between Generations

Bianca Swift serves as Assistant Editor on the Charles Chesnutt Archive. Swift holds an MA in English (Creative Writing) and a BA in English with minors in French and African American Studies. Swift is a published author and a recognized performance poet. She has worked for the Nebraska Writers Collective as a Teaching Artist and has performed in Spoken Word Poetry Competitions in Philadelphia, PA, Houston, TX, and Richmond, VA. Swift’s work represents an archival practice that links documentary editing to place-based recovery, public memory, and a vision for a community-engaged archive. Working with Kenneth Price on the Chesnutt Archive, she has been at the forefront of imagining ways to recover and connect Chesnutt’s archive to the public. Readers of Scholarly Editing should see in Swift’s journey important questions about the value of the archive to the public, the future of editorial labor, and the ways in which ethical archival practice shapes culture. Swift articulates a vision of recovery practice that wrestles with the benefits and challenges technology poses to textual scholarship. Regardless of the technological changes, she highlights the critical need to ensure that archives have relationships with the communities they serve.