River Styx: Liberating the Spoken Word

The River Styx: Liberating the Spoken Word project was funded by the Access to Historical Records grant in 2017-19 from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC).

The grant money allowed digitization of all the cassette and reel-to-reel tapes in the River Styx Archive, the Jan Garden Castro Papers, and the Michael Castro Papers. Together, these collections contain 947 audio recordings of literary readings, musical performances, and artist interviews in the St. Louis region from 1969-2008.

A curated selection of the digitized recordings is available to listen to online via this digital collection. These are mainly the River Styx at Duff’s performances which included prominent and multicultural poets and other writers.

Also included in Liberating the Spoken Word are digitized brochures, announcements, correspondence, schedules, flyers, press releases, clippings, and other supporting documentation from the aforementioned collections and from the Duff’s Restaurant Literary Events Collection.

All of the digitized recordings are searchable via the respective finding aids linked above. If you wish to listen to any recordings that are not available to stream in the digital collection, you may contact us at spec@wumail.wustl.edu to arrange to listen to them.