Who We Are

WPA FWP Writers Project photograph - 20th century

The 21st-Century Federal Writers’ Project is a unique program of Community Initiatives.

  • John A. Glusman is Vice President and Executive Editor of W.W. Norton & Company. A publishing veteran of 45 years, he has edited fiction, non-fiction, and worked with Richard Powers, Frans de Waal, Ronan Farrow, Erik Larson, Ben Macintyre, Annie Proulx, David Rohde, David Sanger, William Taubman, and Neil de Grasse Tyson. He is the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945 (Viking, 2004), winner of the Colby Award, and in 2019 was named a distinguished alumnus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He is the founder of the Westchester Book Festival, which is having its premiere in Katonah, NY, in Fall 2025.

  • Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Department of Information Studies, UCLA. In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences serves on the Academy Council, and is the Chair of the Humanities, Arts, and Culture Advisory Committee. In 2023 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, inducted in 2024. In 2021 she received the AIGA’s Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism. She has been the recipient of Mellon (1988-89), Getty (1994-95), and Fulbright (1984-85) Fellowships and was the inaugural Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Yale’s Beinecke Library in Spring 2019. 

    She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021). Her most recent publication, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), documents the intellectual history of knowledge about the invention and spread of the alphabet.

    She received her BFA from California college of Arts and Crafts in 1973; MA in Visual Studies from University of California, Berkeley, in 1982, and her PhD in Écriture: the history and theory of the visual representation of writing from UC Berkeley in 1986. Her dissertation focused on “Experimental Typography in Modern Art Practice: 1909-1923” and was later published as The Visible Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 

    Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. The Century of Artists’ Books, published by Granary Books in 1994, remains a definitive and classic text in the field. Other recent work includes Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), and Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Press, 2018). Her solo exhibit of artworks, Graphic Animism, was held in Los Angeles at the Himalaya Club early in 2025. 

    She is currently working on ChronoVis, a platform for humanistic time modeling, as well as various other creative and critical projects. Her book, Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent was published byThe Bridge publishers in May 2025.

  • Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. His six poetry collections include Interrogations at Noon, which won the 2001 American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016)., which won the Poets’ Prize as the best book of the year. His most recent volume is Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). His five critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (2002) and Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life (2021). Gioia served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009 and as California State Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2019. His other awards include the Laetare Medal, Presidential Civilian Medal, and the Aiken-Taylor Award in Modern Poetry. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.

  • Colleen Jaurretche is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of English at UCLA where she focuses on twentieth century British and Irish authors. She has published two books on James Joyce, as well as edited a collection of essays on Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and published numerous essays in James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies Annual, and Joyce Studies Annual. She is a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is currently working on a memoir set in her native northeast Los Angeles told through the memories, migration narratives, and landscapes of her European, Mexican and Indigenous family. In the course of research she’s made many discoveries, including her Teme-Augama Anishnabai citizenship. In 2010 she co-founded and co-directs Libros Schmibros Lending Library, located in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.

  • Paul Vandeventer served as President & CEO of Community Partners, a nonprofit he co-founded with prominent attorney Albert R. Rodriguez in 1992 to help foster, launch and grow creative solutions to community challenges. Paul led the organization through 30 years of dynamic growth and development to now include 180 projects, a core staff of 50, more than a dozen civic intermediary programs, and the management of more than $80 million annually. Paul’s expertise includes management, training, and organizational development. He is the co-author of “Networks that Work: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Networked Action,” and writes and speaks extensively on civil society, community, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.

  • Laura Zapiain serves as Senior Product and Privacy Counsel for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she works with the organization’s education teams. Prior to joining CZI, Laura was Legal Counsel at MGM Resorts International, a global entertainment company in Las Vegas, NV Her work included counseling senior business leaders on regulatory matters (including privacy and the FCPA) and transactions (entertainment and hospitality). Before that, she served as VP of Compliance in a healthcare tech startup. She began her career in private practice at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr (WilmerHale) in Washington, DC where she led investigations in Latin America, as well as worked in Asia and the Middle East. and then Holland Hart in Las Vegas. Laura earned her B.A. in literature from Claremont McKenna College and her J.D. from Stanford Law in 2010.

  • David Kipen served as Director of Literature for the NEA under both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has written for publications as varied as The Nation and the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and many more. Kipen also teaches writing at UCLA and is the founder of Libros Schmibros, a 15-year-old storefront nonprofit lending library in a historically working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. The former book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, he co-produced and hosted the Emmy-nominated public-television documentary A New Deal for Los Angeles. His 2020 Los Angeles Times article, "85 years ago, FDR saved American writers. Could it happen again?", has led to a bill currently before Congress, the 21st-Century Federal Writers' Project Act (H.R. 5192), and, in 2025, to the founding of the nonprofit 21st-Century Federal Writers' Project.