The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work.

This virtual event has a $25 registration fee. Click here for more information and to register.

This program will launch of the much-anticipated biography Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by author Benjamin Taylor! Hear an excerpt from Taylor’s new book, followed by a discussion with Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors president and professor Bob Thacker.

Benjamin Taylor received a 2021 Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir Here We Are was published by Penguin Books in May 2020. His previous memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and Robert McCrum in The Observer (London); and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, and Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, also a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His edition of the collected stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2017. French and Italian translations of Here We Are were published in 2021. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Chasing Bright Medusas, his biography of Willa Cather, is due from Viking Press in 2023.