Eudora Welty Foundation

The Eudora Welty Foundation’s 2012 year was a busy one, indeed, and 2013 activities are underway with vigor. The Foundation continues to collaborate with the Eudora Welty House and Garden on public and educational programming. It also supports work being done in the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and by Suzanne Marrs, the Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at Millsaps College in Jackson. The Foundation and its partnerships extend Welty’s works and her love of reading and writing far and wide.

NEH-funded Workshops to Host Teachers from across the Nation

Eighty teachers from across the nation came to Jackson this summer to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop sponsored by the Welty Foundation and Millsaps College.

“One Place, One Time: Jackson, Mississippi, 1963,” held in two sessions, coincided with the 50th anniversary of the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Written the day of the assassination, June 12, 1963, Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was reviewed in the workshop.

According to project co-director, Stephanie Rolph, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Millsaps College, participants discovered “new ways of understanding the complex intersections of race and power, cultural change and resistance, institutions and individuals.”

Project co-director and Welty scholar Suzanne Marrs says that among civil rights veterans and scholars participating were Medgar Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers, distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Alcorn State University. Teachers studied archival collections, visited historic civil rights sites and museums, and explored Welty’s and other artists’ responses to Evers’s assassination. Tours included the Welty House and the Education and Visitors Center exhibit that opened in May on Welty, Evers, and civil rights.

New Orleans’s Ogden Museum of Southern Art Features Welty Images

An exhibit featuring 50 Welty photographs and 84 vintage snapshots opened April 18, 2013, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and will hang through July 14. Entitled “Eudora Welty: Photographs from the 1930s and ’40s,” the exhibit will be part of a Mississippi artist showcase including works of William Hollingsworth and Walter Anderson. Welty Foundation guests enjoyed the exhibit’s opening reception.

Stanford Actors Bring Welty Stories to Life on Stage

The Foundation and Millsaps College partnered in bringing three exceptional actors from Stanford University to Mississippi to present staged interpretations of Welty stories at Millsaps, Mississippi State University–Meridian, and Alcorn State University in March 2013. Courtney Walsh delivered a delightful portrait of Sister, the China Grove postmistress in “Why I Live at the P. O.”; Angela Farr Schiller was inspiring as Phoenix Jackson in “A Worn Path”; and Rush Rehm was chillingly sinister as the racist assassin in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” Suzanne Marrs introduced the programs and moderated discussions with the audiences.

Welty Garden and Book Continue to Inspire and Attract Support

The Welty Garden and Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown’s One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place continue to be featured in national media, the latest being the April 2013 issue of Martha Stewart Living. In 2012, the book won the Welty Prize at the Welty Symposium at Mississippi University for Women and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for non-fiction.

Mississippi State University’s Department of Landscape Architecture has added its considerable talent and expertise to the Welty Garden team, providing assistance with the development of a long-term landscape management plan.

In April 2013, Eudora’s birthday celebration at the Welty House featured a Foundation-sponsored sale of custom-grown camellias and annuals benefitting the Welty Garden fund.

Scholastic Writing Competition Winners Announced

Four young Mississippi writers were selected for national honors in the Scholastic Writing Awards competition of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, for which the Eudora Welty Foundation serves as the Mississippi affiliate. The Foundation works in partnership with the Eudora Welty House, which administers the competition with the generous support of the C Spire Foundation.

The April 2013 awards program honored national winners with three gold medals, one silver medal, and an...