18th International Willa Cather Seminar “Bright, Beautiful, and Alive”: Willa Cather’s New York Intersections at The New School in Greenwich Village: June 21-23, 2023

The 18th International Willa Cather Seminar—“Bright, Beautiful, and Alive”: Willa Cather’s New York Intersections—will take place in New York City. The seminar is part of a year-long celebration of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s 150th birthday, and it will occur a few weeks after the June 7th unveiling of her statue in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol.

Scholars from the U.S. and abroad will examine Cather’s life and work within the context of her forty years as a resident of New York City. The Seminar will take place June 21-23; it is a collaboration between the National Willa Cather Center, The New School, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Registrations will be accepted through Friday, June 16. No registration is required to attend lectures by invited speakers. The following lectures are free and open to the public.

• Authors Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall with a talk titled ‘”Raw and relentless /gaudy and extravagant”: Willa Cather’s New York.’ Wednesday, June 21, at 7:00 p.m, 65 W. 11th Street—Wollman Hall—B500, 5th Floor
• Writer and historian Hugh Ryan, with a talk titled “Greenwich Village History and Willa Cather’s Place In It.” Thursday, June 22, at 3:30 p.m., 66 W. 12th Street—Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall—A404, 4th Floor

Despite her strong association with the Great Plains, Willa Cather lived most of her life in New York City (1906-1947), first in Greenwich Village and later on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. Though Cather only occasionally wrote about the city, it was her home for decades and a key element of her personal and professional life. The seminar takes place only blocks from the apartments Cather and her partner Edith Lewis shared between 1906 and 1932. It will explore the city Cather knew, while locating Cather within the broader context of New York in the first half of the twentieth century and her work as a product of that urban experience. 

Invited Speaker Bios

Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winner for criticism and previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. In Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, Jefferson examines her life through the artists who have influenced her, including Willa Cather. She is professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Elizabeth Kendall is a nonfiction writer and the author of the memoir, American Daughter: Discovering My Mother, and, more recently, Balanchine and the Lost Muse and Where She Danced, a history of modern dance. She is associate professor of liberal studies and literary studies at the Eugene Lang College of The New School in Greenwich Village, teaching classes in memoir, cultural criticism, and race and gender in American culture. 

Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian, and curator in New York City. His most recent book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, is a history of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village—the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. It is the winner of the 2023 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle of the American Library Association, as well as the 2022 Warren Johansson Award from the W.A. Percy Foundation.

“Looking up the Avenue through the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and shining horses and carriages,—occasionally an automobile, mis-shapen and sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and beautiful and alive.” —“Coming, Aphrodite!” (1920)

For a full schedule and registration information, visit: www.willacather.org/events/18th-international-cather-seminar 

Held throughout the world, the 18th Willa Cather International Seminar is a biennial initiative of the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. An archive, museum, and study center, the National Willa Cather Center was established in 1955 and is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that promotes Willa Cather’s legacy through education, preservation, and the arts. Programs and services include regular guided historic site tours, conservation of the 612-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, and organization of year-round cultural programs and exhibits at the restored Red Cloud Opera House. The Center houses growing archival and museum collections and preserves ten properties that make up the largest collection of nationally-designated historic sites related to an American author. The organization also publishes the Willa Cather Review, a leading source for Cather-related news, features, and scholarship. For more information, visit www.WillaCather.org, follow the organization on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter [@WillaCatherFdn] and the Red Cloud Opera House on Facebook [@RedCloudOperaHouse]. We are also on Youtube at the National Willa Cather Center.