Eudora Welty Society

Abstract

Eudora Welty Society Harriet Pollack In 2018 the Eudora Welty Society met and held sessions at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference in Austin, Texas, and at the American Literature Association meeting in San Francisco, California. Panel topics included Nasty Women in the Fiction of Eudora Welty; New Work on Eudora Welty; Murders and Murderers: Eudora Welty's Take on Detective Fiction; and Welty By and By. Speakers included Jacob Agner, James Andrew Crank, Sarah Harsh, Sophia Kane Leonard, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, Courtney Kunkle Salinas, Cindy Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Dawn Trouard, and Adrienne Akins Warfield. There were also panels on Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty at both those meetings as well as at the Mississippi Festival of the Book, and, in February 2019,at the Eudora Welty Education and Visitors Center in Jackson. These accompanied the 2018 release of Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: [End Page 105] Twenty-First-Century Approaches (UP of Mississippi), edited by Mae Miller Claxton and Julia Eichelberger. In addition to the editors themselves, presenters included contributors Lee Anne Bryan, Carolyn Brown, Sarah Ford, Rebecca L. Harrison, Ebony Lumumba, Suzanne Marrs, Pearl McHaney, Laura Sloane Patterson, Gary Richards, Christin Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Harriet Pollack, Alec Valentine, and Keri Watson. This year the Eudora Welty Society held a conference for the first time in Charleston, South Carolina, a city that Welty visited and photographed. The program for "'The Continuous Thread of Revelation': Eudora Welty Reconsidered," February 21 to 23, 2019, can be seen at ewr.gsu.edu/news-notes. Harriet Pollack, EWS President, and Julia Eichelberger, both at College of Charleston, directed and hosted the event. More than forty Welty scholars discussed Welty's fiction, photography, memoir, letters, and archival documents. The conference also featured a Charleston writers panel with Marcus Amaker, Harlan Greene, Josephine Humphreys, and Michele Moore, who—in homage to Welty's memoir, One Writer's Beginnings—discussed their own literary starting points. Another exciting feature was a staged reading of "Moon Lake" adapted and directed by Brenda Currin and performed by Welty scholars. The 2020 Eudora Welty Review will feature revisions of presentations from the conference, guest edited by Sarah Ford and Adrienne Akins Warfield. The CFP can be found elsewhere in this issue of EWR and online at ewr.gsu.edu and eudoraweltysociety.org. EWS hosted two sessions at the 2019 American Literature Association in Boston, May 23–26, 2019: "One Writer's Beginnings Reconsidered" and "Eudora Welty: The Eye of the Photographer." One Writer's Beginnings Reconsidered Chair: Katherine Frye, Pepperdine University "Palimpsests and Performances: Reading Welty's Correspondence with Frank Lyell alongside One Writer's Beginnings," Julia Eichelberger, College of Charleston "Shelter for Secrets: Reconsidering Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings in Light of Kiese Laymon's Heavy," Margaret Pless, University of Mississippi "Not a Weather Prophet: Eudora Welty and One Writer's Beginnings," Rebecca Mark, Tulane University [End Page 106] Eudora Welty: The Eye of the Photographer Chair: Carol Ann Johnston, Dickinson College "The Architecture of Affect: Eudora Welty's Cemetery Photography," Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi "Reflexive Echoes: The Textual Reverberations of Eudora Welty's Photographs," Nathan Dixon, University of Georgia "The Spatial Politics in Eudora Welty's Photographic and Literary Works," Zhihuan Liu, Nanjing University "Intimacies and Ordinariness, Recording Reality: The 2019 Edition of Eudora Welty's Photographs," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston Topics for EWS panels at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas, April 2–5, 2020, will be "Radical Welty" and "Welty and the New Mississippi Renaissance." Topics for EWS panels at the American Literature Association meeting in San Diego, CA, May 21–24, 2020, will be "Welty and the Body" and "Welty, Modernism, Media." Related CFPs will soon be announced. [End Page 107] Harriet Pollack President Copyright © 2019 Department of English, Georgia State University