The ERASURE Project: Poetry to preserve

Banned word list, updated April 28th (PEN America)

This past March, we initiated ERASURE, as special project created in response to the federal government's rapidly growing list of words and materials being taken off of government websites and documents in an effort to remove references to diversity, equity, and inclusion in addition to numerous other topics. With federal agencies struggling to communicate essential ideas out of fear of grant funding being cut off, with even public health agencies being directed to take down public data off of websites around transgender health, information about HIV, and more.

For the ERASURE project, we wanted to stress their how important and potent these words are — both as means of creative expression via poetry, and more importantly, to what communities and issues these words represent — and so we asked members of our community to create poems, lines, or verses featuring words and phrases flagged by the Trump administration. Poets used erasure techniques as a starting point to select words, implementing them in a variety of forms that explored a variety of experiences.

Below are submissions we received in March. As we said above, this list of words unfortunately continues to grow, but we likewise don't want to you stop creating art valuing those words.

If you feel inspired to write more poetry based off of this project and would like to share, we invite you to email your poetry patrick@thewell.world!