March 22, 2007 The American Folklife Center To Host StoryCorps Booth March 26 - April 1

WHAT: Press is invited to speak with staff of the StoryCorps project, the American Folklife Center and interviewees who will be on site, including Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Simon Leon, a black World War II veteran.

The brainchild of MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay, StoryCorps is a national initiative encouraging Americans to record one another’s stories in sound. Launched in 2003 with a single recording booth in Grand Central Terminal in New York, the project has collected more than 9,000 interviews to date. These oral histories are preserved for all time as part of the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

In 2005 StoryCorps launched a new effort, a nationwide tour of two mobile recording booths, at the Library. That same year, a second stationary booth was added at the site of the World Trade Center. In February 2007, StoryCorps began a one-year campaign titled the Griot Initiative to collect interviews from at least 1,750 African-Americans.

WHEN: Monday, March 26, at 11 a.m.

WHERE: Plaza in front of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C.

For more information on StoryCorps and the tour of the mobile recording booths, visit www.storycorps.net. To learn more about the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, visit www.loc.goc/folklife.