Poe Studies Association Updates

From Amy Branam Armiento, PSA President

Since the last issue, many Poe-related activities have taken place. The Poe Studies Association's panel at the MLA Convention, "Poe and Trauma," featured three scholars' research. On January 19, crowds gathered in Baltimore at Westminster Hall and in Richmond at the Poe Museum to celebrate the 210th anniversary of Poe's birth. Last October, the inaugural Poe Fest International took place in Baltimore, coinciding with the 169th anniversary of Poe's death. If you are on the PSA Listserv, you have already received a call for entries for this year's Saturday Visiter awards.

In the wake of these events, the PSA now turns its attention to awarding the Patrick F. Quinn Award for an outstanding monograph on Poe, the James W. Gargano Award for an outstanding article, and the J. Lasley Dameron Award for an outstanding bibliography or essay collection, and to our two panels at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston and our annual business meeting held there. One of the agenda items is the PSA's Fifth International Poe Conference, which is scheduled for 2021 in Boston—the northernmost of the "Poe cities." If you cannot attend the conferences and meeting but you have ideas to share, please do not hesitate to contact any of the executive committee members or post to the Listserv.

From Emron Esplin, PSA Vice President

Several members of the Poe Studies Association gathered in Chicago on January 5, 2019, at the annual MLA convention for a panel titled "Poe and Trauma." Panelists examined trauma in Poe's Gothic tales, his angelic dialogues, and "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains" as well as in 2018 Charlottesville, Virginia. The question-and-answer period led to discussions about Poe's own traumatic life and his depictions of trauma in several other works. For the 2020 MLA convention, the PSA is sponsoring a session called "Poe, Islands, Archipelagoes." Islands are central to some of Poe's works—think "The Island of the Fay," the later chapters of Pym, the barrier island setting of "The Gold-Bug"—but they also play important roles in other Poe texts in which they are not overtly visible—for example, the orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is brought to Paris from Borneo. This panel will follow the currents of archipelagic American studies to reassess how islands function in Poe's literary corpus.

From Adam Lewis, PSA Member-At-Large

At the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston (May 23–26, 2019), the PSA will sponsor a roundtable, "Poe in the Archives," to discuss the physical and digital archives of Poe's work, touching on such subjects as the use of archival material in the classroom and innovative approaches to Poe's archives in public and digital humanities projects. The roundtable members include Richard Kopley, Travis Montgomery, Paul Lewis, and Jacqueline Pierazzo. As we are aware, the Edgar Allan Poe Society website (eapoe.org) founded by Jeffrey Savoye is an invaluable digital archive of Poe's work. Many other databases and archives provide access to digitized versions Poe's publications and manuscripts. Physical copies of Poe's letters and manuscripts can be found at the Boston Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Valentine Museum in Richmond, and many other libraries throughout the country. These digital and physical archives represent incredible resources for teaching Poe in the United States and throughout the world, inside classrooms and to the larger public.

From Cristina Pérez, Member-At-Large

The PSA panel "Poe and Childhood," which I will chair at the American Literature Association's Thirtieth Annual Conference, includes the following speakers: Charles Grimstad, Columbia University, who will speak on "Notes on Poe and Lolita"; Richard Kopley, Penn State DuBois, who will speak on "A Neglected Book from Poe's Childhood"; and Michelle Pacht, CUNY, whose paper is titled "A Child Adrift: Finding Family at Sea in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."

From Carole Shafer-Koros, PSA Treasurer

As of February 8, 2019, we have 221 members. The current checking account balance is $33,036.42. This includes the following restricted funds...