This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Threats to the humanising culture of books and reading come in different forms. The three of us perceived a broad connection between the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, the hub of Baghdad's literary life and the neglect and deterioration of our own Detroit area public libraries, still so central to community educational life in inner city neighbourhoods. Our three very different artistic practices came together to reflect on the value of our neighborhood public libraries and feature this connection in a way no one of us could have envisioned alone. The book that resulted, Date due: a library book from Detroit to Baghdad is a tribute to the public spaces that provide a refuge for open access to ideas and communication that survives, in spite of the violence and neglect that jeopardise them"--Artist's statement from the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

Toby Millman is a photographer and printmaker and also works with audio recording and paper cutting. Her recent work explores issues of mapping, borders and identity as they relate to geopolitics and civil society in and around Palestine. Her artist books are in numerous public collections including the Getty Research Institute, the Print Collection at the New York Public Library, Harvard, Columbia and Yale Universities, and the Art and Ethnography Museum at Birzeit University. She is originally from Miami and currently lives in the Hamtramck enclave of Detroit.

Kathleen Rashid is a Detroit artist who shows her work regularly throughout the Detroit area and beyond. She has taught art at the Detroit Institute of Arts since 1996, and facilitated many community art-making workshops geared toward developing creative, critical and collaborative skills. She is also a founding member of Detroit Women in Black, part of a worldwide network of people who actively oppose war, occupation, and their violent consequences.

Elizabeth Sutton was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She is a photographer who works with film and Polaroid transfers for her images of nature and streetscapes of Detroit. An art instructor at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Education Director at 555 Gallery and Studios, she shows her work in various galleries in the Detroit area.