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: Chris Harding Thornton (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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Take a trip to 1930s Omaha and its fictionalized criminal past in Little Underworld, a new noir mystery from Nebraska novelist Chris Harding Thornton! Hear an excerpt from her book and learn more about how she drew from Omaha's early 20th century history to create this twisty tale. As always, viewers are encouraged to ask questions and make literary connections during this early spring event.
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Virtual Author Series: Thomas C. Gannon (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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Step into the world of bird-watching just ahead of the annual Sandhill crane migration! Join us for an evening with Thomas C Gannon as he shares a reading from his new book, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir, an intriguing meditation on the intersections between nature and identity. Have your questions ready for what is sure to be a lively discussion following Gannon's reading!
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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.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Acclaimed mystery novelist Alex Kava will be on hand to talk about her impressive career as a Nebraska author who writes in the tradition of other Nebraska mystery novelists such as the late Mignon Eberhardt. Mystery of Hunting's End, Eberhart's 1930 book set in the Nebraska Sand Hills is the 2023 One Book One Nebraska selection. Kava's most recent novel in her Ryder Creed series, Fallen Creed, will also be highlighted during this talk. In her 2022 novel, Ryder Creed and his scent dog, Grace, return to Nebraska to solve a gruesome crime discovered by a rural Postal carrier. Alex Kava is the New York Times, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of twenty-one novels that include the critically acclaimed series featuring K9 handler Ryder Creed and the international bestselling series with FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell. She’s been awarded two Nebraska Book Awards, a Florida Book Award and the Mari Sandoz Award.
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Virtual Author Series: David McKay Powell (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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-seven operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera’s complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell’s Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. David McKay Powell is associate professor of English at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky, where his research focuses on the intersections of classical music and American literature.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Tracy Daugherty will discuss his book 148 Charles Street. This novel explores the friendship between Willa Cather and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Two different writers with distinct styles. Cather was the novelist while Sergeant was the muckraking journalist. Their friendship becomes tested after Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered. This is a story of how friendship endures through disagreements and misunderstandings.
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Virtual Author Series: Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann (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 is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann, two writers with Nebraska roots who explore the world in order to learn more about their place in it, will be part of an engaging conversation about Nebraska memoir. If you are interested in the same "human stories" Willa Cather illuminated in her own work, you will enjoy this free author series event! Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery's book Halfway from Home examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home. In Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life, Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes. Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.
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68th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference (Read More)
Complex and Brilliant: Cather at 150 The 68th annual Willa Cather Spring Conference, held during Willa Cather's sesquicentennial year, provides an opportunity to pay homage to the author's life and legacy here in Nebraska. Just as Cather wrote about the "certain qualities of feeling and imagination" possessed by Nebraska's early immigrant homesteaders in her essay, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Cather's 150th birthday will will commemorated by examining the evolution of her own writerly imagination. This conference will also examine Cather's novel A Lost Lady, which celebrates its publication centenary in 2023, and other texts that Cather published in 1923, such as her revised book of poetry, April Twilights and Other Poems. The conference will begin the morning of Thursday, June 1, and conclude on the evening of Saturday, June 3. Please see the conference website for the schedule of events. Registration is required. In-person registration ($150 / $75 student) includes the full schedule, with a separate ticket needed for the Saturday evening banquet. Online-only registration ($100 / $50 student) includes access to all paper panels, the scholarship ceremony, the Passing Show, and invited speaker events.
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68th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference (Read More)
Complex and Brilliant: Cather at 150 The 68th annual Willa Cather Spring Conference, held during Willa Cather's sesquicentennial year, provides an opportunity to pay homage to the author's life and legacy here in Nebraska. Just as Cather wrote about the "certain qualities of feeling and imagination" possessed by Nebraska's early immigrant homesteaders in her essay, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Cather's 150th birthday will will commemorated by examining the evolution of her own writerly imagination. This conference will also examine Cather's novel A Lost Lady, which celebrates its publication centenary in 2023, and other texts that Cather published in 1923, such as her revised book of poetry, April Twilights and Other Poems. The conference will begin the morning of Thursday, June 1, and conclude on the evening of Saturday, June 3. Please see the conference website for the schedule of events. Registration is required. In-person registration ($150 / $75 student) includes the full schedule, with a separate ticket needed for the Saturday evening banquet. Online-only registration ($100 / $50 student) includes access to all paper panels, the scholarship ceremony, the Passing Show, and invited speaker events.
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68th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference (Read More)
Complex and Brilliant: Cather at 150 The 68th annual Willa Cather Spring Conference, held during Willa Cather's sesquicentennial year, provides an opportunity to pay homage to the author's life and legacy here in Nebraska. Just as Cather wrote about the "certain qualities of feeling and imagination" possessed by Nebraska's early immigrant homesteaders in her essay, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Cather's 150th birthday will will commemorated by examining the evolution of her own writerly imagination. This conference will also examine Cather's novel A Lost Lady, which celebrates its publication centenary in 2023, and other texts that Cather published in 1923, such as her revised book of poetry, April Twilights and Other Poems. The conference will begin the morning of Thursday, June 1, and conclude on the evening of Saturday, June 3. Please see the conference website for the schedule of events. Registration is required. In-person registration ($150 / $75 student) includes the full schedule, with a separate ticket needed for the Saturday evening banquet. Online-only registration ($100 / $50 student) includes access to all paper panels, the scholarship ceremony, the Passing Show, and invited speaker events.
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“The Last Prairie” Sandhills documentary film (Read More)
If a prairie could speak, what would it say? The Last Prairie is a documentary film by John O’Keefe, a theologian and documentary filmmaker at Creighton University, that profiles the Sandhills of Nebraska, one of the last remaining intact temperate grasslands in the world. Presented through voices from three different communities, the film listens to ecologists who love and study the region’s biodiversity, ranchers who live and work on its vast expanse, and Native Lakota people whose ancestors were killed to make way for American westward expansion. The film is screening as part of a "Celebrate Prairie Spring!" event at the National Willa Cather Center beginning at 1:30 p.m., with the film screening at 7 p.m. in the Opera House auditorium. $15 tickets are required. For more information about the event, visit https://www.willacather.org/events/celebrate-prairie-spring.
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Henrietta Solway – Performance and Discussion (Read More)
Animal Engine Theatre Company’s "Henrietta Solway" is an original play for all ages that was inspired by the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather and commissioned by the National Willa Cather Center. "Henrietta Solway" brings to life an exciting and heartfelt tale of ambition, sacrifice, and reconciliation in small towns, big cities, and vast landscapes. The event will include a panel discussion by Dr. Charles Peek, Dr. Steve Shively and the writers and performers of "Henrietta Solway". There will be two performances - one at 9:45 a.m., and one at 1 p.m. The performances are free and open to the public. For 30 years Dr. Charles Peek has led the service at Grace Church, Red Cloud, that accompanies the Cather Spring Conference. He was President of the Board Of Governors from 2005-2010 and served on the board for five years after and has presented papers at three International Cather Seminars, as well as taught four Roads Scholar classes on "My Antonia". Steve Shively enjoyed a 44-year career as a high school teacher and university professor, most recently at Utah State University, from which he retired in 2019. His work focused on American literature and preparing future teachers. A long-time member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation, Steve’s contributions include co-editing Teaching the Works of Willa Cather and serving as an issue editor of the Willa Cather Review. His research interests include Cather and religion, pedagogy, and Cather in Nebraska. He has written papers on several Nebraska authors in addition to Cather including Mari Sandoz, Alvin Johnson, Weldon Kees, John Janovy, and John Neihardt.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. Poet Jamaica Baldwin will be on hand for a special poetry reading and discussion in anticipation of "Bone Language", her brand new collection of poems. Jamaica (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, will be published by YesYes Books in April 2023. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award. Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains, an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective, and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica is currently the associate editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln where she is pursuing her PhD in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies.
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Willa on Wheels: Cather’s Characters Travel from Page to Stage (Read More)
Rachel Olsen, director of education and engagement at the National Willa Cather Center, will give a talk about a selection of Willa Cather’s novels and short stories featured in the play, “Henrietta Solway,” adapted by Animal Engine Theatre Company.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. "Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land" is Taylor Brorby's account of his childhood and adolescence in Center, North Dakota, interwoven with historic coal-country vignettes. Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. He is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. In "Private Way," set in 2015, protagonist Vivi Marx winds up off the grid in Nebraska in order to escape professional and personal turmoil, and as a result seeks solace from Willa Cather's novels. Ladette Randolph is the author of five books: three novels: Private Way, Haven’s Wake and A Sandhills Ballad, a short story collection, This is Not the Tropics, and a memoir, Leaving the Pink House. The recipient of four Nebraska Book Awards, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and a citation from Best New American Voices, she is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Ploughshares at Emerson College and co-owner of the manuscript consulting firm Randolph Lundine. A long-time Nebraskan, she spent her childhood in the same part of west-central Nebraska where her family lived for five generations. She now lives in Boston with her husband Noel.
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 is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. Oscar Hokeah's "Calling for a Blanket Dance" tells the story of Ever Geimausaddle and his struggle to carve a place for himself in an increasingly precarious community. Hokeah's debut novel has been described as a "stunning" example of "honest storytelling," and it has been longlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Medal. Oscar Hokeah is a regionalist Native American writer of literary fiction, interested in capturing intertribal, transnational, and multicultural aspects within two tribally specific communities: Tahlequah and Lawton, Oklahoma. He was raised inside these tribal circles and continues to reside there today. He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother (Hokeah and Stopp families), and he has Mexican heritage from his father (Chavez family) who emigrated from Aldama, Chihuahua, Mexico. Oscar Hokeah holds an M.A. in English from the University of Oklahoma, and a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA, and also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Hokeah has written for Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, World Literature Today, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.
