Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference by American Literature Association (review)

We mourn the loss of Susan Hawkins, respected member of the Cormac McCarthy Society and participant in many Society-sponsored conferences and activities. Professor Hawkins earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Portland State University and in 1981 received her PhD from the University of Oregon with a dissertation, “The Poetics of the Postmodern American Prose Poem.” She was a poet herself, and her love of the power of language guided her reading, research, and teaching interests. She held teaching positions at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark University before settling for most of her career at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. There she taught modern and contemporary fiction and poetry to undergraduates and Master's candidates and served as English Department Chair in her last five years before retiring in 2012.Professor Hawkins won various awards and grants, among which was a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bulgaria, but she was proudest of receiving the Oakland University Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. The university's most distinguished teaching award, it is given to one faculty member per year chosen from across the university's disciplines.Those who attend conferences and panels on Cormac McCarthy will remember Susan's work on Cold War themes, American imperialism, and end-times in McCarthy's later works. Her “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia” (Cormac McCarthy International Conference, University of Reims, France, 2002), was selected for inclusion in Christine Chollier's Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories. Other presentations include “Renegotiating the Border(s): Cormac McCarthy's Revisionist Western Romance” (Great Lakes American Studies Association Annual Conference, 1997); “‘Tryin to Minimize the Pain’: The End of Things in Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain” (Cormac McCarthy Annual Conference, Austin, 2000); “Out of the Preterite World: Crossing into the Cold War” (American Literature Association, Boston, 2005); and “Historical Endings, Vestigial Times: Cormac McCarthy's The Road” (American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction, San Diego, 2006). In the final years of her career, Professor Hawkins undertook an extended research project entitled “Chronicles of the Late World: Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” and she delivered a series of related papers from this project at the American Literature Association in Boston, 2007; the Cormac McCarthy Society International Conference in Warwick, England, 2009; and the American Literature Association Fiction Symposium, Savannah, 2011.Society members will miss Professor Hawkins' wit and humor, her feistiness, her capacity for friendship, and her support for the work of her colleagues and students.

Eudora Welty Society Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy After two years of virtual events during the height of the COVID pandemic, the Eudora Welty Society made a much-anticipated return to inperson conferences in 2022. At the May conference of the American Literature Association (ALA) in Chicago, the Society met and conducted its annual business meeting with current officers presiding: Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy, Presidents; Rebecca Harrison, Vice President; and Laura Wilson, Treasurer. Additionally, the society sponsored two panels, a roundtable, and a reprised dramatic reading of Welty's "Moon Lake," led by adaptor and director Brenda Currin and performed by Welty scholars. (Thereafter, Laura Wilson interviewed Brenda Currin for the Eudora Welty Review volume 14, 2022.) In June, the society sponsored two panels at the biennial conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL). The Society also presented a roundtable in October at the ALA Symposium "The Historical Imagination in American Literature" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The year 2022 marked a transition to a new listserv for the Society, replacing the old listserv hosted by Emory University. All future Society correspondence should be directed to our new listserv at eudorawelty society@baylor.edu. Society members are also eligible for numerous awards sponsored by the EWS. The Society regularly supports young Welty scholars by awarding travel grants to graduate students presenting at ALA. Recipients for 2022 included Jacob Agner, Summer Delgado, Nathaniel Hawlish, and Grace McCright, who each received $100. In conjunction with the Eudora Welty Review, the Society awards the annual Ruth Vande Kieft prize for an outstanding essay on Welty. The 2022 prize of $150 went to Judy Butterfield for her essay "'An Is Different from My Is': The Lost Mother and the Subjectivity of the Motherless Child in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Welty's Delta Wedding," which appeared in volume 14 of this journal. At the 2022 SSSL conference, the society [End Page 193] honored two recipients of the biennial Phoenix Award given to a scholar who has made considerable contributions to Welty studies. Since the pandemic precluded public recognition of the 2019–2020 winner, David McWhirter, the Society recognized both David and the 2021–2022 winner, Mae Miller Claxton. The Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty series published by the University Press of Mississippi released three new volumes in 2022: Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden In Plain Sight (Dec. 2022), edited by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack; The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty (May 2022) by Danièle Pitavy-Souques and editor Pearl Amelia McHaney; and Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections (Mar. 2022) by Annette Trefzer, which won the 2022 Eudora Welty Prize. All three volumes can be purchased on the University Press of Mississippi's website: upress.state.ms.us. For further information about these volumes' contents and contributors, see the Checklist of Welty Scholarship elsewhere in this issue. The Eudora Welty Society will host two panels and a roundtable at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference in Boston. Topics include 1) Material Welty Roundtable, 2) Gender, Objects, and Welty, and 3) The Sensual, Sexual, and Erotic Welty. Below is a detailed list of the conference panels hosted by the Eudora Welty Society in 2022: American Literature Association Conference, May 26–28, 2022, Chicago, Illinois Eudora Welty and Performance Chair: Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 1. "Stagestruck: Eudora Welty and the Theater," Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College 2. "'That's me': Eudora Welty and the Performative Self," Katie Berry Frye, Pepperdine University 3. "The (Cinematic) Eye of Her Story: Eudora Welty and Film," Jacob Agner, University of Mississippi 4. "Eudora Welty's Cinematic Spaces: Inhabiting 'Why I live at the P.O,'" Dina Smith, Drake University 5. "On the Process of Adapting Eudora Welty for Performance," Brenda Currin, Independent Scholar, Actress, and Adaptor [End Page 194] Eudora Welty and Ecology Chair: Sarah Ford, Baylor University 1. "'It was said she believed in evolution': An Ecogothic Reading of 'Moon Lake,'" Grace McCright, Baylor University 2. "Eudora Welty's Dual Vision of Arcadia," Pearl McHaney, Georgia State University 3. "Laurel's Influx and Efflux: Reading the Non-human in The Optimist's Daughter," Nathaniel...

Research Article| May 01 2019 Abstracts for the PSA Panel at the American Literature Association The Edgar Allan Poe Review (2019) 20 (1): 171–172. https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.20.1.0171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Abstracts for the PSA Panel at the American Literature Association. The Edgar Allan Poe Review 1 May 2019; 20 (1): 171–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.20.1.0171 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Edgar Allan Poe Review Search Advanced Search When asked in a 1965 interview what scenes from history he would like to have filmed, Vladimir Nabokov included William Shakespeare in the role of the ghost of King Hamlet, the beheading of Louis XVI, Herman Melville feeding a sardine to his cat, and “Poe's wedding.” Nabokov doesn't elaborate on the last choice, though attentive reading of his 1959 novel Lolita shows just how obsessed he was with Edgar Allan Poe. The novel is packed with references to the American writer, starting with its original title, A Kingdom by the Sea, taken from Poe's lyric ode to his child love, “Annabel Lee.” What is the link between Poe's youthful real-life bride Virginia, who was thirteen when Poe married her, and Nabokov's stylistically exhilarating and deeply disturbing novel about an middle-aged émigré lusting after, possessing, and repeatedly violating his own child bride? What can we learn from the novel's obsessive... You do not currently have access to this content.

Editor's Note

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and creative writer who has contributed significantly to Poe studies worldwide through her presentations, publications, and service to the Poe Studies Association over the course of her productive career. Beth’s research and teaching interests are wide ranging—including detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, feminist narratology, local writing, and poetry.Beth first studied Poe in the context of postmodernist “metaphysical” detective stories. Most of her work on detective fiction, including even an essay on Barbara Wilson’s lesbian detective novel Gaudi Afternoon, and some of her work on Nabokov (another major area of study) incorporate Poe. At some point, after chairing a session at the first international Poe conference and beginning to offer a regular seminar on “Poe’s Haunted World,” Beth became utterly absorbed in his work beyond the detective genre. Her training at Mount Holyoke and Brown University is mostly in twentieth-century American and European literature, but delving into Poe involved immersing herself in his world, so she found herself exploring nineteenth-century phenomena such as natural science, artificial light, optical devices, early photography, public speaking, and ventriloquism as contexts for his work. Coming to Poe “in a backwards fashion,” as she recounted in a Zoom seminar last year, allowed her to be playful and experimental, which resulted in her writing a screenplay based on his courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman and sculpting books out of clay representing the experiences of reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat.” As she wrote to me about her feelings toward the PSA, “I was welcomed by the PSA, and I have met wonderful friends and colleagues” while serving in various leadership roles and participating in many of the PSA’s activities over the years.In addition to the recognition she has received from the PSA for her outstanding research (the Gargano Award for an essay on Poe published in 2018 and in 2020 for a chapter published in a volume that won the Dameron Award), she has contributed significantly to our association by serving as PSA vice president, president, and immediate past president (2007–13), an editorial board member of the Edgar Allan Poe Review, and a member of three international conference program committees, the Gargano and Dameron Award committees, and, most recently, chair of the PSA nominating committee (on which she had served previously as a member). Beyond the PSA, Beth has volunteered her time and expertise to judge the Saturday “Visiter” Awards at the 2022 Poe Fest International. Many of us recall and appreciate seeing or acting in her screenplay about Poe’s romance with Sarah Helen Whitman at the Positively Poe Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. These contributions, as well as her participation as a speaker and a chair at the PSA’s major conferences as well as at PSA-sponsored sessions at the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association, illustrate her longtime engagement with and advancement of Poe studies.For her important contributions to Poe studies and her advancement of the mission of our organization, the Poe Studies Association recognizes Susan Elizabeth Sweeney with PSA honorary membership, which includes lifetime dues, a commemorative plaque, and the well-earned admiration of her peers. I look forward to the opportunity to present this award to Beth, if possible, at the 2023 ALA Convention in Boston.

This past year has presented our organization with a series of challenges. However, our members have responded with ingenuity and flexibility so that we could continue the work of our mission: to support the scholarly and informal exchange of information on the life, works, times, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe.First, I’m pleased to announce that our 2020 American Literature Association presenters were able to postpone their presentations and joined us for this year’s conference. Both of our sessions were prerecorded, and instructions on how to access them will be provided as soon as we have the information. Please note that the American Literature Association has changed the weekend: the conference will take place July 7–11, 2021. As usual, we will hold our annual business meeting, and members will be able to attend virtually. I want to thank Cristina Pérez and Sławomir Studniarz, our members-at-large; Travis Montgomery, our secretary; and our presenters for their work throughout this year to make these sessions possible.Second, “Poe Takes Boston: The Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference” has been rescheduled for April 7–10, 2022, in Boston at the Omni Parker House, a beautiful hotel with an impressive literary legacy. Paul Lewis, Richard Kopley, and Philip Phillips have succeeded in renegotiating our venue contract and rewriting our CFP timeline so that we will be in the best position to hold an in-person conference. We are grateful to them for their time, patience, and planning over the past year, and we hope to gather once again with our friends and colleagues to celebrate Poe.Finally, we plan to continue our monthly PSA online forums via Zoom. When Richard Kopley first proposed this idea to the executive committee, I admit that I was uncertain about how well the idea would be received. With hindsight I can see that my initial response was unwarranted. These sessions provide opportunities for our colleagues around the world to engage in discussions about various topics related to Poe, and I feel like I have been able to get to know so many more of our members through this series. For more information and access to recordings of our previous sessions, you can visit the link under Conferences on the PSA website, https://www.poestudiesassociation.org/conferences.Please watch our listserv for updates on these events and many more. I look forward to seeing you soon—whether online or in person.On January 7, 2021, more than thirty PSA members and other colleagues from sites across the globe joined together via Zoom for the organization’s annual MLA session—this year, a roundtable on “Revisiting Poe’s Poems.” Our four presenters—Maria Ishikawa, Stephen Rachman, Les Harrison, and Edward Whitley—discussed everything from Eureka to beating hearts, from creating an edition of Tamerlane to considering Whitman’s Poe. The dialogue that followed, we hope, will be a prequel to future conversations that take Poe’s poetry seriously and attempt to read it in new and compelling ways. The PSA session at the upcoming 2022 MLA Convention will be titled “Reading Poe Now.”Two panels will be presented at the 2021 American Literature Conference in Boston: “Poe in the Wireless Classroom” and “Poe’s Environmental Humanities.” I will chair the former, which will be prerecorded by the following PSA members: Susan Amper, Bronx Community College, presenting “Wi-finding Poe for the Thumb Generation”; Helciclever Barros da Silva Vitoriano, National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (Anisio, Brazil), presenting “‘The Raven’ Online: Mapping Reprints as well as Literary and Artistic Translations over the Internet”; Les Harrison, Virginia Commonwealth University, presenting “Editing Poe in the DH Classroom”; and Lesley Ginsberg, University of Colorado Springs, presenting “Teaching Poe with Digital Resources in 2020.” I plan to attend ALA in person, so maybe I will see you there for a conversation … six feet apart!As of February 22, 2021, we have 183 members. The checking account has $27,589.81. Restricted funds include: the Leslie Dameron Award, $1,501.88; the Gargano Award, $3,260.10; and the Quinn Award, $2,425.93. Restricted funds total $7,187.91. We hold three CDs, in the amounts of $6,322.74, $2,384.27, and $10,005.89. Adding the CDs to the checking account, we have a total of $46,302.21, but deducting the restricted funds, we have $39,114.30 in available funds.Please remember to renew your membership when due and notify me of change of mailing or email address. Tax-deductible donations to PSA are welcome.

Poe Studies Association Updates

The Arthur Miller Society, American Literature Association May 2011 Conference Sessions

Eudora Welty Society Sarah Ford, President The Eudora Welty Society holds its annual business meeting in May of each year at the American Literature Association conference, this year in Boston. Current officers are President Sarah Ford (Baylor University), Vice President Julia Eichelberger (College of Charleston), and Secretary-Treasurer Michael Kreyling (Vanderbilt University). The society regularly sponsors sessions showcasing Welty scholarship at the ALA, SSSL, SAMLA, and SCMLA meetings. The panels the Welty society sponsored at the 2015 ALA meeting follow below. Society members receive information through the Eudora Welty listserv and are eligible for several prizes and awards. The society sponsors a Graduate Student Award for travel to the ALA conference to present a paper on Welty. The 2015 winner was Shinji Ohno from the University of Mississippi. American Literature Association, Boston, Massachusetts, May 21-24, 2015 Eudora Welty and Social Class [session one] Chair: Julia Eichelberger, College of Charleston [End Page 115] 1. “‘Out of a Fit of Pure-D Jealousy’: Re-Deployment of ‘Southern’ Class under the Cold War in The Ponder Heart,” Shinji Ohno, University of Mississippi 2. “Welty’s Classism,” Jolene Hubbs, University of Alabama 3. 3“‘Because we live here, don’t we, Miss Jenny?’: Geographic Uncertainty in Welty’s ‘At the Landing,’” David Russell, Lock Haven University Eudora Welty and Social Class [session two] Chair: Barbara Ladd, Emory University 1. “The Issue of Class in Welty’s Autobiographical Girl Stories,” Harriet Pollack, Bucknell University 2. “Transformative Performances: Eudora Welty’s Parade Photographs,” Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi 3. “Middle-Class Welty,” David McWhirter, Texas A&M University Copyright © 2015 Department of English, Georgia State University

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

Dear readers,Allow me to welcome you to the first issue of our new journal. It is exciting to finally see the tangible results of an idea raised casually in pre-Covid times during informal conference discussions at the American Literature Association and given momentum during further conversations with potential contributors and supporters at the “Robert Lowell in Europe: The Centennial Conference” hosted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, at the end of March 2017. I am pleased to have steered that idea through to this present moment, especially as I can put on record my thanks to those who helped me along the way. Chief among these people are Steve Axelrod and Tom Travisano who proved so open to and supportive of this venture and who have kindly provided a prologue to our journal. I also want to thank the organizers of that Lowell Centennial Conference, Thomas Austenfeld and Aurélie Zurbruegg, as well as its participants for helping me confirm the viability of this venture and being supportive of it. I am grateful to Ben Leubner for taking on the book review editing duties and to my contacts at Penn State University Press who have been excellent to work with. Indeed, the journal would not exist without the help of Rachel Ginder, Julie Lambert, Diana Pesek, and Patrick Alexander.This emphasis on contacts and the people who can help realize an ambition and fulfil a need brings me to an appeal I wish to make to you as this journal’s editor. The quality of a journal is reliant on its submissions and the only way to secure those submissions is by spreading the word among your own contacts, networks, students and colleagues. I cannot underestimate how important and valued that process is and I invite you not only to submit your own work but to encourage others to do so. I welcome hearing from you personally about your own future publications related to Bishop or Lowell so I can keep abreast of current work and organize adverts and reviews. I am also open to any features you wish to see appearing in the journal in the future, and that you can contribute to, be it a regular bibliography or, like Bethany Hicok’s column in this issue, a reflection on ongoing research in the archives, future conference preparations or teaching experiences you would like to share. Ideas for guest-edited and themed issues are also welcome and I hope you find that my door is always open to proactive suggestions for content and improvements.I sincerely hope you enjoy the journal and the opportunity this gives us to continue promoting the rich legacy of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

Poe Studies Association Updates

"American Poetry": A Symposium Sponsored by the American Literature Association

Eudora Welty Society David McWhirter, President The Eudora Welty Society, founded in 1991, holds its annual meeting in May of each year at the American Literature Association Conference, this year in Boston. Current officers are President David McWhirter (Texas A&M University), Vice President Sarah Ford (Baylor University), and Secretary-Treasurer Michael Kreyling (Vanderbilt University). The Society regularly sponsors sessions showcasing Welty scholarship at the ALA, SSSL, SAMLA, and SCMLA meetings. In addition, the International Conference of the Welty Society—“‘Everybody to their own visioning’: Eudora Welty in the 21st Century”—was held April 4–7, 2013, at Texas A&M. The conference featured some forty scholarly presentations, a reading by and conversation with acclaimed fiction writer Jill McCorkle, a keynote address by Suzanne Marrs focused on Welty’s long relationship with fellow fiction writer and New Yorker editor William Maxwell, and a special performance of A Fire Was in My Head, adapted from Welty’s story “Music from Spain,” directed by David Kaplan, and featuring Brenda Currin and Philip Fortenberry. Other conference highlights included “Welty at Home,” a presentation by Alanna Patrick (in absentia) and Betty Uzman drawing on the rich Welty archive located at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Society’s recognition of Forrest Galey, also of MDAH, for her many contributions to Welty scholarship. A complete program for the conference, as well as other announcements and calls for papers for upcoming conference panels, can be found on the Society’s website eudoraweltysociety.org. Society members receive newsletters and other information through the Eudora Welty Society listserv and are eligible for several prizes and awards. The Phoenix Award is a biennial award presented for distinguished achievement in Eudora Welty Scholarship, most recently presented to Suzan Harrison, author of Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence and a former Society President, for 2012. The Society also sponsors a Graduate Student Award for travel to the ALA conference to present a paper on Welty and co-sponsors the Ruth Vande Kieft Prize for the best essay on Welty by a beginning scholar. The Vande Kieft Prize carries with it an award of $150 and publication in the Eudora Welty Review; it was awarded in 2013 to Jacob Agner, a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi, for his essay “A Collision of Visions: Montage and the [End Page 186] Concept of Collision in Eudora Welty’s ‘June Recital,’” included in this issue of the EWR. For submission guidelines for the Vande Kieft Prize, see the announcement at the back of this issue. American Literature Association, Boston, MA, May 23–26, 2013. Eudora Welty Open Topic, First Session Chair: David McWhirter, Texas A&M University 1. “‘Not Legally, But Really’: Negotiating Property and Power in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding,” Emily Daniell Magruder, California State University 2. “The Novelist Crusades: Narrative Agency of African-Americans in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding,” David Smith, Baylor University 3. “Deviance, Criminality, and the Imagination in Eudora Welty,” Barbara Ladd, Emory University Eudora Welty Open Topic, Second Session Chair: Sarah Ford, Baylor University 1. “Mother Tongue: Eudora Welty, Warren County, and Some Early Fiction by Reynolds Price,” Bruce W. Jorgensen, Brigham Young University 2. “‘The Whole Solid Past’: The Object World of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter,” Travis Rozier, University of Mississippi 3. “Ecstasy and Agency in Welty’s Letters and The Bride of the Innisfallen,” Julia Eichelberger, College of Charleston Eudora Welty Society Business Meeting Eudora Welty scholars and readers are invited to join the Society for just $10 for two years (eudoraweltysociety.org/membership.html) and to support its work of promoting Welty studies scholarship and continuing her legacy as one of America’s greatest twentieth-century writers. [End Page 187] Copyright © 2013 Department of English, Georgia State University

American Literature Association