Founded in 1974, it has published works by Frannie Lindsay, Fred Marchant, Jay Rogoff,[1] Grace Cavalieri, Donna Denizé, Christopher Bursk, and Enid Shomer[2] and is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
[9][10] Founded as a non-profit organization staffed by volunteers, The Word Works was originally funded through frequent grants received from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the early 1980s, the Word Works sponsored an oral history project, which recorded the development of the African-American intellectual and professional community in Washington, D.C., between the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial and the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The program, conceived and led by Betty Parry, culminated in a symposium at the Folger Shakespeare Library, “In the Shadow of the Capitol,” presenting the principals of that era (e.g., Sterling Brown and May Miller) to a new generation of Washingtonians.
The organization's archives are housed at the Special Collections Research Center in the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library at The George Washington University.