Eudora Welty Society

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 San Francisco. Current officers are President Harriet Pollack (College of Charleston), Vice-President Annette Trefzer (University of Mississippi), and Secretary-Treasurer Adrienne Akins Warfield (Mars Hill University). The Society regularly sponsors sessions showcasing Welty scholarship at the meeting of the American Literature Association, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and the South Central Modern Language Association meetings. In addition, the Society holds free-standing Welty conferences; plans for the next of these are listed below.

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. 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 2018 to Kelsey Moore, Colby College, for her essay “‘As if a rabbit had run over her grave’: Gothic Girlhood in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding,” included in this issue of the EWR. For submission guidelines for the Vande Kieft Prize, see the announcement elsewhere in this issue.

Membership is currently $10 for two years and can be purchased on the Eudora Welty Society website.

Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack are planning an edited volume of essays: Eudora Welty and Mystery. The complete CFP is the back matter of this issue of EWR.

The Eudora Welty Society will hold two panels at the American Literature Association 2019 in Boston on the following topics: 1) Welty’s photography and 2) One Writer’s Beginnings. Watch for CFPs for these panels will be posted on the EWS, EWR, and ALA conference websites.

The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty Reconsidered

An International Welty Society Conference, Charleston, SC, Feb. 21–23, 2019

The Eudora Welty Society is excited to host its conference for the first time in Charleston, a city Welty visited and photographed. We invite colleagues in Southern Studies, American Studies, and all related fields of study to join us in investigations of this renowned Mississippi writer, her legacy, and her national and international reputation. This conference, held at the College of Charleston, will examine Welty’s fiction, photography, letters, memoir, archival documents, essays, reviews, interviews, films, and more. Along with presentations of scholarly work, the conference will also offer a Charleston Writers panel, receptions, literary and historical tours, a dramatic reading of a Welty work performed by Welty scholars, plus free time in the evenings to enjoy Charleston on your own. For more information, email ewsconf@cofc.edu.

Potential conference paper topics might include explorations of:

• • Memory: how memory is constructed, reconstructed, repressed in Welty’s work; competing subjectivities in her fiction and the differing memories that result, Welty’s works alongside other texts that explore similar relationships to past histories, times, places, people

• • Attention to history and historical trauma: Jim Crow, the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the 1960s, the effects of American class, gender, and racial hierarchies

• • Did the writer crusade? social justice and political issues

• • History, public culture, and performance; representations of performers, performances, audiences, and performativity in the fiction and photography

• • Welty out of the South: travel and transnational perspectives, especially Welty & black literatures (African American, diaspora, global South)

• • Welty’s immigrants (German, Irish, Italian, Spanish) and the topic of immigration

• • The MDAH: archival work, editing Welty and her archive

• • Welty’s relationship to detective, crime, mystery, horror fiction (see related cpf announcing a future volume on this topic)

• • Welty’s bookshelf: her reading habits, who she read, how they influenced her work, relationships with contemporary authors, books in her texts, and so forth

• • Bodies in her work: ugly, beautiful, othered, disabled, alive, dead, and undead...