Author Series and Book Signing: Gail Shaffer Blankenau (Read More)
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 free in-person author event is part of a National Nebraska Day event. Click here for more information and for a recommended registration link. Observe National Nebraska Day by learning more about the complex history of the state's south central region. Author and historian Gail Shaffer Blankenau will join us for a talk and signing of her new book, Journey to Freedom: Uncovering the Grayson Sisters' Escape from Nebraska Territory, at the Red Cloud Opera House auditorium at 1:00 p.m. central time. Blankenau's book tells the story of Celia and Eliza Grayson, two enslaved sisters who escaped from their enslaver Stephen F. Nuckolls in 1858. According to the University of Nebraska Press, "Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons’ courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period."
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Virtual Author Series Special Event: Benjamin Taylor Book Launch and Reading (Read More)
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.
