About us!
The seeds for the Left Bank Humanities Foundation
began in 1996 first as a series of simple HTML text
documents designed to capture the brief historical notes of
the lesser known women writers, musicians, artists,
publishers and patrons of early Modernism. (click
here to view) These pages
were produced and maintained by
Ms. Paula DiTallo, a software engineer with a passion
for literature. As the internet community began to expand
rapidly, Ms. DiTallo began to receive several emails a
day, requesting more information about the writers and
artists profiled . (and about other writers and artists not
profiled!) The emails arrived from places as far
away as New Zealand and as close as Atlanta. By
the end of 1998, the emails blossomed to several hundred a
month! At that point, Ms. DiTallo began searching for
a pattern regarding the types of emails received. After
three months of organizing the letters by category, as well
as evaluating the web site traffic reports, Ms. DiTallo
noticed that most of the emails and online traffic came from
rural, or underserved regions of the United States,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Brazil.
By 1999, Ms. DiTallo enlisted the help of
Ms. L. Margaret Pomeroy, a University of Texas graduate
in Modern English to help produce the online periodicals,
The Left Bank Review
and the Echo Journal.
These journals act as a link to the rich world of art,
literature, and music to underserved communities all over
the globe, but particularly to those communities underserved
in the United States.
Now in 2005, the LBHF is a long way
from the first few online biographical sketches of the more
obscure expatriates, however, we haven't forgotten how
empowering those first few pages were to those whom
either discovered these personalities for the first
time, or found themselves able to connect with others online
sharing the same interests.
As we
move toward 2006, we hope to inform and inspire even more
people by continuing to provide free access to the arts and
humanities. We deliberately present our journals in an
interdisciplinary way to remind us all that history, art,
literature, music, philosophy, economics and politics are
all tightly woven.
Click here to learn more about
our staff and volunteers!
