Eudora Welty Society

It is customary that a report on the activities of the Eudora Welty Society is included in the annual Eudora Welty Review. Looking back to 2020, the year marked by the Coronavirus crisis and a worldwide pandemic that caused the complete shutdown of public life, it is my pleasure to report on the remarkable health, resilience, and vitality of the Society.

This backward glance is normally an occasion to list numerous academic events that the Society hosted or attended, including conferences and paper presentations. Last year no such occasions were able to take place as scheduled. In April of 2020, the conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature titled "Beyond Borders, Bars, and Binaries: Rethinking South in an Age of Crisis," which was to be held in Fayetteville, Arkansas, had to be canceled. The Welty Society had scheduled a business lunch meeting for April 3 in addition to two Eudora Welty panels and a reprisal of the 2018 dramatic reading of "Moon Lake." The "Radical Welty" roundtable, proposed by Rebecca Mark, found so much scholarly resonance that it was opened to nine panelists for short "manifesto-like" statements. The panel on "Welty and the New Southern Renaissance" was to have explored Welty's appearances in the work of contemporary writers. In addition, several other panels at the conference were to include Welty papers. What was supposed to be an energizing academic meeting could not happen despite all the dedicated hard work of Lisa Hinrichsen, SSSL President.

In May of 2020, another major networking opportunity for Welty scholars, the American Literature Association conference, was also canceled. A glance at the program reveals a planned session on "Welty, Media, and Modernism" and a panel on "Welty and the Body." ALA conference directors Olivia Carr Edenfield and Leslie Petty invited Author Societies back for in-person and remote panels for a July 2021 ALA conference—see panel information below.

Despite all of these and other cancelations, Eudora Welty Society members came together on zoom on April 13, 2020, for a toast in honor of Eudora Welty's 111th birthday. The recent pandemic left us all trying to adapt quickly, and during the summer months, the Welty House organized a virtual Welty-at-Home Book Club, and Suzanne Marrs lead an online discussion of Losing Battles. Margaret Pless Zee, a PhD student in the English Department of the University of Mississippi and the 2020 MDAH Research Fellowship Award winner gave a zoom presentation on her archival research on One Writer's Beginnings in September. For outstanding service to the Eudora Welty Society and exceptional scholarship, David McWhirter was unanimously chosen as the 2020 honoree for the Phoenix Award. Congratulations! While public life slowed during the pandemic, scholarly projects, such as the essays in this volume, kept moving ahead.

The 48th-annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, focused on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. "Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence" took place July 18-22, 2021, and centered on biographical and critical intertextualities that emerge from putting the writers side by side and in conversation with each other. In addition to high-caliber academic papers and keynote addresses, the cultural programming included a screening of a new Faulkner documentary, "The Past Is Never Dead: The Life of William Faulkner," and talkback led by director Michael Modak-Truran; a screening of "Almos' A Man," the 1976 film adaptation of Wright's story "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," with talkback led by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson; and the long postponed theatrical reading of Welty's short story "Moon Lake," adapted and directed by renowned stage and screen actress Brenda Currin, with members of the Eudora Welty Society reading all of the character parts. A complete program for the conference, as well as other announcements for papers and conference panels can be found on the Society's website: eudoraweltysociety.org and at www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.

American Literature Association, Boston, MA July 7-11, 2021 Welty, Media, and Modernism

Chair: Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston

1. 1. "Pulp Fiction: Reading Magazine Culture in Eudora Welty," Katie Berry...