National Willa Cather Author Series

Virtual Author Series: Richard Norton Smith (Read More)

Renowned author and historian Richard Norton Smith will speak about Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy, and Cather's enduring place in American literature. Registration is required to receive an event link. Richard Norton Smith is an author, historian, biographer, and former director of five presidential libraries, including the Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and the Gerald R. Ford; the founding executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; and founding director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The Willa Cather Author Series is a free program that features mostly virtual but occasional in-person authors who explore humanities topics related to Willa Cather, Great Plains history, and art across a variety of styles and genres. The author series was conceived 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 how their writing depicts shared experiences. Each author series event is designed to include a prepared discussion with the moderator and author(s), as well as ample time for audience Q&A.

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Virtual Author Series: Terese Svoboda (Read More)

The National Willa Cather Center hosts a discussion of Svoboda’s answer to Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia: Bohemian Girl! Readers will delight in the story of Harriet as she searches for her father in the American West. This event concludes the fourth year of free programming with this last Virtual Author Series of 2024. Registration is required to receive an event link. Terese Svoboda is the author of nine collections of poetry, six novels, three collections of short fiction, a memoir, and a book of translations from the Nuer people of South Sudan. Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide. In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects, her interest in fabulism, and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Granta, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The New York Times, Narrative, Slate, and Paris Review. The New York Post described her memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent as "astounding;" The Washington Post regarded her biography Anything That Burns You as "magisterial."

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