This collection comprises the archive of the writer and editor David Levi Strauss, known for his writings on art and photography, as well as for his critical investigations into the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Praised by such peers as Lucy Lippard, John Berger, Dave Hickey, and Arthur Danto, Strauss has been widely recognized as a key voice in American art criticism over the last four decades. Along with documenting Strauss’s extensive work in the visual arts, the archive also holds significant material related to his longstanding engagement with poetry, including the papers of the poetry magazine ACTS (1982–1989), for which he served as editor. It also includes extensive material related to the Poetics Program at New College of California, with substantial documentation of the circles of Diane di Prima and Robert Duncan. Following Strauss’s trajectory from poet and editor in the experimental literary culture of the 1980s to his position today as a leading critic of photography and visual culture, the archive offers an important record of the literary and artistic networks in which his work developed, providing a vivid portrait of the personalities, debates, and intellectual life of poetry, art, and criticism from the 1980s to the present.