70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference

Mark your calendars for the 70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference! We are delighted to welcome Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley to Red Cloud. Smiley's Friday evening talk on "Willa Cather, My Ántonia and the Life of a Writer" will mark the conclusion of a year-long celebration of Cather's 1918 novel as a title selected by the National Endowment for the Arts' 2024-2025 Big Read program. Additional conference programs will celebrate the 100th publication anniversary of Cather's 1925 novel The Professor's House. This year's theme invites Cather scholars and enthusiasts to explore not only the literal landscapes and rooms her characters inhabit, but also the cultural, historical, and environmental realities that do, or in some cases, do not, inform her work.

The conference will begin Thursday, June 5th with a plenary talk about Cather and Mesa Verde by interpretive ranger Ann Lundberg, as well as the return of the popular star-gazing on the prairie program that evening! Author Jane Smiley will join us as an invited speaker on Friday, June 6th, and the spring conference banquet and performance by indie-folk group the Kilbanes, will take place on Saturday, June 7th. Attendees are also encouraged to visit, We're Still Here: American Indian Spirit in the Unmade Place, on view at the Red Cloud Opera House Art Gallery.

You may also like the following events from The Willa Cather Foundation:

• Next month, 17th June, 06:00 pm, American Voice: An Evening With Willa Cather in Chicago
• Next month, 25th June, 09:00 am, 19th International Willa Cather Seminar in Milwaukee

Also check out other Business events in Red Cloud, Conferences in Red Cloud, Arts events in Red Cloud.