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Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here is an arts initiative and an archival collection conceived as a response to violence and directed at creating shared cultural spaces. The project and the collection were initiated by Beau Beausoleil in 2007 following the March 5 car bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street (the street of the booksellers) in Baghdad, Iraq. Beausoleil writes, "We are not a project of pity or healing; we are a project of Witness, Memory, and Solidarity," and "Free speech and the free exchange of ideas are at the core of what al-Mutanabbi Street represents to us. We do not attempt to speak for the Iraqi people, they have their own voice. Rather, we want them to know that we see them and hear them in their own struggle for a more just society, and that we will not let anyone in the West forget them." As of 2023, the archive holds approximately 260 artists' books, 200 prints, 100 letterpress broadsides, 57 photographs, and a collection of bookmarks, made by over 600 poets, writers, and artists from twenty countries. The artists' books are cataloged individually in CLIO, and are described as a group in the record https://clio.columbia.edu/archives/15498023. The project also produced an anthology, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5th, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad's "Street of the Booksellers," published by PM Press in 2012. Edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema K. Shehabi, the anthology includes writing by Iraqis and an international group of poets and writers. Copies are cataloged in CLIO.