City Lives is an ongoing project, focusing on a different theme each year. In the Spring of 2000, University of Massachusetts Lowell students in a creative writing class, along with several photography students, produced the first City Lives public exhibition, The Universe of Lowell: Lives in the City. The exhibition focused on a variety of Lowell natives, all born and still residing in Lowell, Massachusetts. The exhibition featured both photographs of these subjects and excerpts from stories written about their lives. Along with the photos and biographical excerpts forming the main exhibition in downtown Lowell, this project featured a hand-bound chapbook (distributed at the exhibition opening) with the full biographical narratives of those interviewed, and tape recordings and transcripts of the interviews (deposited in the archives at the Center for Lowell History).

City Lives 2001 was founded on the hope that viewers of the exhibition would gain an understanding of and perhaps take the time to reconsider the experiences and shared wisdom of our city's residents-neighbors, every one-and that they would learn of or revisit personal aspects of our city's history, thus strengthening the social fabric of our community. It explored what it means to live in an old mill town like Lowell, to survive the city's hard times, and to enjoy its recent successes. The project examined what it means to live here or anywhere--indeed, what it means to be human.

While these biographies were written as part of a course offered by the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the public dissemination of this material through the exhibition and chapbooks is a supplementary activity that has been funded through the generous support of the UMass Lowell Council on Diversity and Pluralism (2000), Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (2001), the UMass Lowell Advancement Office (2002), and the Patrick J. Mogan Center (2003/4). We would like to acknowledge our sincere gratitude for the generous support of these major funders.

Past material from the City Lives series will be posted on this website over the next couple of months.

For more information about the UMass Lowell English Department, see their website or contact Professor Diana Archibald at Diana_Archibald@uml.edu.

Website photo credits: Tara Lee Woodside, Tony Tieuli, Brenda Bergeron, Karen Medici, Jiwook Yoon, Helena Parrish, and Manish Sachdera