This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Those driven mad by war is a collaboration between Helen Frederick, Peter Winant and Susan Tichy for the Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here artist book project. Noted poet Susan Tichy is a full professor at George Mason University, where she has taught since 1988 in the MFA and undergraduate programs. International visual artists Helen Frederick and Peter Winant are professors in the School of Art and Design. Found text is from the book Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi. Essay is 'Al-Mutanabbi Street' by Lutifiya al-Dulaimi."

"Helen Frederick is known mainly for hand-driven media such as custom-formed paper, artist books, paintings, drawings, and prints that often incorporate the use of language. She also adapts electronic media and sculpture in her installations, and in 2016 will exhibit an interactive work at The Phillips Collection, Washington DC. Frederick's work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC and many other national and international collections. Major exhibitions of Frederick's work have been held at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, VA, Dieu Donne' Gallery, NY, Henie-Onstad Museum, Norway, and in traveling museum exhibitions in Japan, Scandinavia, Greece, The United States and South America. Frederick founded Pyramid-Atlantic, a center for contemporary printmaking, hand papermaking, and the art of the book, which she directed for twenty-eight years. Currently she directs printmaking and enjoys working with graduate students at George Mason School of Art, where she serves as director of the department's imprint Navigation Press, in tandem with her interest in curating and coordinating international cultural projects. In 2008, she received the Southern Graphic Council distiguished International Printmaker Emeritus Award. She is featured in the Feminist Art Base of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Art Institute Oral Traditions archives"--George Mason University School of Art website (viewed June 24, 2015).