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.

"'Manuscripts don't burn' is from the novel 'The master and Margarita, ' written in the 1930's by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Soviet writer and satirist. The line is spoken by the devil to a writer who had destroyed his own work, which then magically reappears. It has been interpreted through the years as a testament to the writer and artist's perseverance through oppression, and became somewhat prophetic for Bulgakov's own life"--Middle East Revised website (viewed July 31, 2015).

"Dan Wood is an artist and printer living in Providence, Rhode Island. After a brief stint studying history at McGill University in Montreal, he received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. He has continued his education in printing ever since, learning the crafts of offset lithographic and letterpress printing in commercial printshops from Washington, D.C. to Providence, Rhode Island. He is presently immersed in his work in letterpress printing, establishing Garbaszawa Press in 1994, and re-inaugurating it as DWRI Letterpress in 2004 to work collaboratively with other artists and designers. He has shown his own work nationally and internationally, and is represented in private and public collections, including the print collections of the New York Public Library, and the RISD Museum of Art"--The Rhode Island School of Design website (viewed July 31, 2015).