American Biography

Our American Biography is useful knowledge for the future history we are making now.

American Biography is inspired by Gertrude Stein’s American Biography: Why Waste It? from her book Useful Knowledge

NON:op invites you to participate in building a shared online American Biography.

Visit the American Biography Archive

An open, digital archive, American Biography is intended to grow as an ongoing, living, collection of personal histories, stories, and memories—as writings, images, videos, sound, or any combination—a place to hold individual, specific, personally-remembered experiences.

American Biography is dedicated to gathering diverse and unheard experiences with America, by people living in America, visiting America, or who are experiencing America from outside America. We are beginning the project with histories focused on experiences of missing voices—of sounds we can no longer hear.

We invite you to contribute your experience with America using one or any combination of these electronic media:

• writing
• poetry
• video
• image(s)
• audio

Whether you:

live in America
• are visiting America
• are experiencing American from outside America

Begin with what you remember:

What have you not heard.
What voices, whose voices, have you not heard.
Whose voices did you not hear.
Whose voices did you miss hearing.
Whose voices could you not hear.

With your permission, we will publish your work as an addition to the American Biography.

Individual contributions will be independently displayed and available for viewers to experience as independent items. Altogether they will form an evolving, collective, dynamic virtual mosaic, displayed, as it grows, in NON:op’s American Biography Archive.

Want to contribute your American Experience or do you have questions about American Biography? Please contact: ann [at] nonopera [dot] org.

Read more of Gertrude Stein’s words about listening: “they do not listen to hear” in American Biography: Why Waste It? => on page 166 of her book Useful Knowledge.

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Our American Biography is useful knowledge for the future history we are making now.