Eudora Welty Foundation

The Eudora Welty Foundation, having concluded a most exciting year of celebrating the Welty Centennial, is very enthusiastic about our 2010 initiatives. We will be completing the fifth and final year of the Capital Campaign to help make certain that Eudora Welty’s remarkable gifts continue to inspire future generations.

This year the Foundation will focus on securing endowments for educational programming to support visiting writers, scholarships, and prizes. Our overall goal is to raise $5 million to interpret Welty’s life and work for people around the world and to ensure that her works remain an integral part of high school, college, and university curricula.

The Foundation is also supporting a $1,000 research fellowship at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, enabling a graduate student to do research in the Welty Collection (see announcement below under MDAH News). Suzanne Marrs, the Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at Millsaps College, is busy assisting with educational programs, helping with the inventory of Welty’s library, and working on the correspondence between Welty and author William Maxwell, long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine.

With support from the National Endowment for the Arts and a generous match from the Comcast Foundation, the Welty Foundation is captioning and preparing for distribution DVD copies of rare films of Welty reading three of her stories—“Petrified Man,” “Why I Live at the P. O.,” and “A Worn Path.” The DVDs are part of a media package containing scans of manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs from the MDAH Welty Collection related to each of the stories. The media package will be available in late Spring 2010. The Foundation is grateful to Mississippi Public Broadcasting for its support of this project.

New officers of the Board of Directors of the Eudora Welty Foundation are Chairman Holmes S. Adams, Vice Chairman Michael Jefcoat, Recording Secretary Liz Welty Thompson, Corresponding Secretary Mary Alice Welty White, and Treasurer Paul Breazeale. The National Advisory Board to the Foundation held its annual meeting in April 2010, in Washington, DC.

The Foundation invites the renewal of annual memberships in Friends of the Eudora Welty House, established to assist us in achieving our goals. Now in its tenth year, the Foundation seeks to promote Welty’s literary legacy and preserve her home, garden, and archives for the enjoyment of future generations. For more information about the Welty Foundation and Friends of the Welty House, visit www.eudorawelty.org. Gifts to the Foundation in any amount are welcomed and are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Contributions may be sent to Eudora Welty Foundation, PO Box 55685, Jackson, MS 39296-5685. You may also join Friends of the Welty House and make a contribution to the Foundation online.