Poe Studies Association Updates

From Philip Edward Phillips, PSA President

Ave atque vale. Before saying farewell as your PSA president, I would like to extend my greetings to all and begin by recognizing some of our most distinguished PSA members for their notable achievements.

I am pleased to announce that Harry Lee Poe (Union University) and Skoko Itoh (Hiroshima University), who had been nominated by the PSA Executive Committee, were duly elected by the PSA membership as Honorary Members of the Poe Studies Association for 2015 for their important and sustained service to our organization and their significant contributions to Poe scholarship.

It is also my pleasure to announce the recipients of our two PSA publication awards. The Patrick F. Quinn Award, established in 1999 by a gift from Mrs. Shirley Quinn and supplemented by family and friends, goes to Barbara Cantalupo for her impressive study Poe and the Visual Arts (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). The James W. Gargano Award, established in 2002 by Mrs. Margaret Gargano and Stephen Loewentheil, goes to Jerome McGann for his outstanding essay “‘The Bells,’ Performance, and the Politics of Poetry,” Edgar Allan Poe Review 15, no. 1 (2014): 47–58. I am grateful to the members of the Quinn and Gargano Nominating Committee and to the PSA Executive Committee for the commitment of time and expertise required to nominate and select our award winners from such a competitive pool of scholarship.

Please remember to mark June 21–24, 2018, on your calendars. In cooperation with representatives of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and both the Hawthorne and Poe Societies of Japan, the Poe Studies Association will hold its next international conference in Kyoto. Sandy Hughes will serve as conference chair, and I will serve as the program chair. Please stay posted for further details and a call for papers.

It has been an honor for me to serve as president of the Poe Studies Association over the past two years. I am especially grateful to those who served with me on the PSA Executive Committee—Vice President Paul Lewis, Secretary Amy Branam Armiento, Treasurer Carole Shaffer-Koros, Members-at-Large William E. Engel and Travis Montgomery, Immediate Past President John Gruesser, and Edgar Allan Poe Review Editor Barbara Cantalupo—as well as those members who participated actively in our meetings and sessions at the ALA, MLA, and Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in New York. It has been an exciting time for Poe studies, from the installation of Stefanie Rocknak’s statue of Poe Returning to Boston in 2014 and our international conference in New York in 2015 to our plans to hold our next international conference in Kyoto, Japan, in 2018. Much remains to be done, and I am looking forward to working alongside our newly elected officers and the PSA membership in the years ahead.

From Paul Lewis, PSA Vice President

I am composing this final message as vice president a week after chairing our MLA panel in Austin on Poe biography. Looking back, I would like to thank the many panelists and respondents who helped make our recent MLA sessions interesting. I would also like to commend Philip Phillips and the other PSA officers and Executive Committee members who have served during my years as vice president. Looking forward to the upcoming PSA elections and my campaign for the presidency, I promise to avoid the overheated rhetoric rife in U.S. politics. For instance, I will not call for the deportation of Longfellow scholars or advocate building walls around Poe historic sites and requiring the Emerson Society to pay for them. Oh, I may entertain such ideas late at night as I hearken “to the death-watches in the wall,” but the sunrise brings brighter thoughts. Like the narrator of “The Premature Burial,” I snap out of it, go abroad, take vigorous exercise, and breathe “the free air of heaven.” Here’s hoping that you can dismiss your “charnel apprehensions” in this way, too.