Several Poe-centric online features were unveiled:

• View a video preview of “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.”

• Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” has been one of his most popular poems since its publication in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror newspaper. This popularity has led to a number of parodies, or humorous imitations, of the poem. Visit the Poe Project website and compose your own parody of “The Raven,” and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win Poe-centric prizes.

• Visit the Ransom Center’s Flickr page to see behind-the-scenes photos of curators and Exhibition Services staff members preparing the galleries and to get a peek at some of the items in the Poe exhibition.

• Poe was so captivated by cryptography that he incorporated it into his story “The Gold-Bug” in 1843. Learn more about how to solve cryptographs, and then practice your decoding skills.

• The Ransom Center has launched the Poe digital collection, where online visitors have the opportunity to see more than 4,000 images of collection and exhibition items, ranging from manuscripts in Poe’s meticulous hand to his annotated copies of the “Tales and Poems” and “Eureka.”

Astronaut on the moon with American flag. From NASA photo no. AS11-40-5875

From the Vietnam War to capital punishment, Norman Mailer engaged the important intellectual and social issues of his time. So it should come as no surprise that Mailer chronicled America’s space program and the 1969 journey of Apollo 11 in a three-part article for LIFE Magazine. Portions of the piece ultimately became Mailer’s book “Of a Fire on the Moon” (Little, Brown, 1970).

As Mailer stated in a letter to Neil Armstrong on February 26, 1970, “I’ve worked as assiduously as any writer I know to portray the space program in its largest not its smallest dimension.” In “Of a Fire on the Moon,” Mailer searches for the moral and philosophical meaning of landing on the moon.

View Mailer’s handwritten manuscripts, research materials, NASA photographs, and notes concerning “Of a Fire on the Moon,” all from Mailer’s archive at the Ransom Center. The collection, which includes materials associated with all of Mailer’s literary projects, whether completed or not, contains more than 1,000 boxes of materials and is available to researchers, students, and the public.

The Harry Ransom Center has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to host The Big Read in Austin, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems.

Beginning Sept. 8, the Ransom Center opens the exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Poe, the great American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story.

The Ransom Center’s sponsored Big Read events include a performance hosted by Isaiah Sheffer of “Selected Shorts,” heard on public radio stations across America, a Poe film series featuring “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1928), “The Raven” (1963), “The Pit and Pendulum” (1961), and a performance of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Herrera’s talk interweaves Frida Kahlo’s art and life, focusing on her childhood, the accident that turned her to painting, her tumultuous marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, Rivera’s influence and other sources of inspiration for Kahlo’s art, Kahlo’s childlessness, her frequent surgeries and her passionate love for her native Mexico.

Seating is free, but limited. This program will be webcast live.

Herrera is a New York-based art historian and critic whose first book, “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” was published in 1983 and in 2002 became the basis for a major motion picture. Her second full-length biography, “Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. She has also written artist’s biographies, including “Mary Frank” (1990), “Matisse: A Portrait” (1993) and “Joan Snyder” (2005). Herrera has curated a number of exhibitions, including a Frida Kahlo show that opened at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 1978 and traveled for a year in the United States. More recently she co-curated the Frida Kahlo centennial exhibition that opened at the Walker Art Center in 2007 and traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Currently she is working on a biography of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Herrera’s talk is in conjunction with the homecoming of one of the Ransom Center’s most famous and frequently borrowed art works, Frida Kahlo’s “Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940). The portrait is on display at the Ransom Center through January 3, 2010.

In the wake of the Great Migration, anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset set out to learn more about the African American “sects and cults” springing up in northern cities. More than fifty years later, “The New Black Gods” reassess Fauset’s work, the organizations he studied and the state of African American religious studies today.

“The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions” (Indiana University Press, 2009) was edited by Harry Ransom Center Curator of Academic Affairs Danielle Brune Sigler and Edward E. Curtis IV.

Taking the influential work of Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offer fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset’s 1944 classic, “Black Gods of the Metropolis,” launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion after the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.

The exhibition highlights Babb’s accomplishments as a fiction writer and illustrates with historical photographs the plight of Depression-era Americans. Many of the photographs were taken by Babb’s sister, Dorothy.

Sanora Babb’s first novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” traces the lives of High Plains families uprooted from their dry land farms and forced to seek work as seasonal harvesters. Random House accepted Babb’s novel for publication in 1939, then broke the contract when John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” appeared, contending that buyers would not welcome two novels treating the same subject. “Whose Names Are Unknown” was eventually published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2004 to much acclaim, including a Los Angeles Times review claiming that Babb’s Dust Bowl novel rivaled Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

In a special Poetry on the Plaza event in honor of National Poetry Month, the Harry Ransom Center presents a marathon reading of “Shake-speares Sonnets” (1609) at noon on Wednesday, April 22.

“Shakes-peares Sonnets” turns 400 this year, and to celebrate, Shakespeare scholars, poets, and others will read from “Shake-speares Sonnets” and “The Lovers Complaint.”

Starting at noon, all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poem “The Lovers Complaint” will be read on the Ransom Center plaza. Readers include Dean Young, the William S. Livingston Endowed Chair in Poetry; James Loehlin, director of the Shakespeare at Winedale program; Franchelle Dorn, the Virginia L. Murchison Regents Professor in Fine Arts; and Thomas Cable, the Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair in English. Cable will recite his series of sonnets from memory.

Birthday cake will be served at this free event to honor William Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23.

This program will be webcast live.

The exhibition has been mentioned in the Tehran Times, Payvand’s Iran News, MehrNews.com, Persian Journal, Press TV and Aaram News.

The U.S. Department of State has also published information about the exhibition on its website in English, Persian and Arabic.

The Persian Sensation is on display at the Ransom Center through Aug. 2. The year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of Edward FitzGerald’s landmark translation of the poetry of the medieval Persian astronomer Omar Khayyám. These gemlike verses about mortality, fate, and doubt became an unprecedented popular phenomenon in England and America but have since fallen into obscurity. Featuring 200 items from the Ransom Center’s extensive collections, the exhibition narrates The Rubáiyát’s history through such items as Persian manuscripts, miniature editions, and illustrated parodies.

An undated Persian manuscript containing Rubáiyát stanzas

English graduate student Yaser Amad, Austin musician and artist Koorosh Angali, Middle Eastern Librarian Robin Dougherty, and Michelle Kaiserlian, co-curator of The Persian Sensation, will perform selections by Omar Khayyám, Rumi, and other classical Persian poets.

Refreshments will be served at this free event.

The edited book includes commentary by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger, who also curated the current exhibition of Henle’s work.

A contributor to such magazines as LIFE and Harper’s Bazaar, Henle had a distinctive style that was characterized by a unique combination of the realistic and the romantic. The catalog reproduces 127 of Henle’s black-and-white and color photographs, and covers the entire range of Henle’s work, including significant items from the photographer’s archive and family.

The exhibition, on display at the Ransom Center through Aug. 2, features more than 100 photographs, including images of 1930s New York, Mexico, and Paris; nudes; and portraits of famous personalities.

View a slideshow of images featured in the exhibition, or view a video preview online.