Poe Studies Association Updates

From Philip Edward Phillips, PSA President

If you have not visited the PSA website recently (http://www.poestudies.org/), I invite you to take a look at the updated history section, which now includes a complete listing of all Presidents and Honorary Members of the Poe Studies Association, as well as all Patrick F. Quinn Award and James W. Gargano Award winners (with full publication information for their award-winning works). I am grateful to those PSA members who responded promptly to my inquiries for historical information about the PSA and our distinguished award winners. I would like to extend special thanks to Judy Mishriki, reference librarian at Penn State Lehigh Valley, for her helpful assistance and for continuing to maintain the PSA website for our organization.

The James W. Gargano Award for the best essay on Poe for a given year was established with a gift from Mrs. Margaret Gargano and Stephen Loewentheil in 2002 to honor the late James W. Gargano. The first Gargano Award in 2001 was shared by J. Gerald Kennedy for his essay “The American Turn of Edgar Allan Poe,” based on his Baltimore Poe Society commemorative lecture, and Jeffrey Savoye for his essay “A ‘Lost’ Roll of Marginalia,” published in the Edgar Allan Poe Review. It is my pleasure to congratulate the winner for 2013, Emron Esplin, whose essay “Borges’s Philosophy of Poe’s Composition” was published in Comparative Literature Studies 50, no. 3 (2013): 458–89. Special thanks are due to our nominating committee—Jana Argersinger and Les Harrison—and to the members of the PSA Executive Committee for making this worthy selection.

The PSA awards Honorary Membership to scholars whose contributions to Poe studies are significant and sustained and who show exemplary commitment to the goals of the PSA. I am pleased to announce that Barbara Cantalupo and Alexander Hammond were nominated by the PSA Executive Committee and elected by the PSA membership to be Honorary Members for 2014. Their citations were read at the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in New York City and will be published in the next issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review.

I had the honor of representing the PSA at the dedication and installation of Stefanie Rocknak’s statue Poe Returning to Boston in Boston on October 5, 2014. On behalf of the PSA, I commend the artist for her masterful rendering of Poe, who, with raven emerging from his suitcase and manuscripts published in Boston trailing behind, dismisses the Frogpondians with a flourish while returning triumphantly to the place of his birth. I would also like to recognize PSA Vice President Paul Lewis, Chair of the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation, for his leadership in making this statue a reality, as well as the members of the foundation’s board—Patricia Bartevian, John LaFleur, Rob Velella, Katherine Kim, Richard Kopley, Philip E. Phillips, Stefanie Rocknak, and Susan Jaffe Tane—for their support of the project. The event, which took place in the Park Plaza Boston and Edgar Allan Poe Square (on the corner of Boylston and South Charles Streets), attracted over four hundred people and was featured on the front page of the New York Times. I do not think it a stretch to predict that Rocknak’s life-sized, street-level statue of Poe will soon become the most popular and most visited piece of public art in Boston.

I hope that many of you attended the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, chaired by Barbara Cantalupo and Richard Kopley, in New York City. We will soon be looking ahead to the American Literature Association Conference, where the PSA will sponsor two sessions, one on “Teaching Poe and Popular Culture” chaired by PSA Executive Committee Member-at-Large Travis Montgomery and the other on “Rethinking Poe’s Sublime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 175 Years Later” by PSA Executive Committee Member-at-Large William Engel. I encourage all of you to attend our PSA sessions and PSA business meeting in Boston.

From Paul Lewis, PSA Vice President

Following the installation of Stefanie Rocknak’s Poe Returning to Boston on October 5, 2014, it...