70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference
The National Willa Cather Center
413 N Webster St
Red Cloud, NE 68970
United States
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“But finally, it all comes back to landscape, to humans changing and being changed by the difficulties and the beauties of the world they must contend with.” – Jane Smiley
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.
Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age, Perestroika in Paris, and, most recently, Lucky. She is also the author of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.
The Kilbanes
The Kilbanes (Kate Kilbane and Dan Moses) are a married composing and performing team and recipients of the 2024 Jonathan Larson Grant. Their rock musical Weightless (WP Theater, A.C.T., Public Theater’s Under the Radar) was nominated for Lucille Lortel (Best Musical), Drama Desk (Best Music), and Off-Broadway Alliance (Best New Musical) awards in 2023. Other works include A Whynot Christmas Carol (A.C.T., Pam McKinnon dir.), The Code (A.C.T.), My Ántonia (Next Generation Commission, Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis - upcoming), As You Like It (San Francisco Shakespeare Festival), and Eddie the Marvelous (American Music Theater Project (AMTP) O’Neill National Music Theater Conference; Berkeley Repertory Theater’s Ground Floor). In addition to giving a talk on their creative process, the Kilbanes will perform compositions from their upcoming My Ántonia musical as the spring conference banquet entertainment!
Call for Papers (Closed)
Cather's House: Examining Built and Natural Environments in Her Work
As both The Professor’s House and My Ántonia are set for big years in 2025—the latter will complete its run as part of the NEA’s Big Read Initiative while the former, Cather’s midlife masterpiece, turns 100—these two novels will share the spotlight at the forthcoming Willa Cather Spring Conference. We encourage scholars and artists to pay special attention to built and natural environments within them, as well as throughout Cather’s life and work. From the Blue Mesa’s Cliff City to the house(s) that give the book its title, The Professor’s House explores the ways built environments both shape and reflect a person’s experience and character. And then there is Jim’s problematic suggestion in My Ántonia that the prairie is nothing but land waiting for development, that it is “the material out of which countries are made.” The observation both debases the ecology of a “natural environment” and effaces the nations that have long called that “unmade” place home.
The directors invite papers on a variety of topics related to Cather and built and natural environments, including but not limited to the following notions:
- Architecture, gardens, and the arrangement of space
- Settler Colonialism in the the life and work of Willa Cather
- Ecocritical approaches, especially in relation to land ethics and environmental stewardship
- “The Novel Démeublé,” whether literally or figuratively
- Placemaking, Town Building and Immigration
- Literary Tourism and Red Cloud
- Regional identity, regional difference
- Domesticity and homemaking in Cather’s work
Proposals of no more than 500 words should describe papers or presentations approximately twenty minutes long. Innovative formats are encouraged. Abstracts, along with a short bio, your contact information and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to Rachel Olsen, Director of Education and Engagement, via the 2025 Spring Conference Proposal Form by March 1, 2025.
Responses to proposals will be sent by mid-March. We will offer an in-person conference but will offer a livestream of our keynote speaker free of charge. Presenters at the 2025 Annual Spring Conference should prepare six to eight slides to accompany their paper. In order to meet the accessibility needs of our attendees, presenters will be required to use a microphone during their scheduled presentation. Questions may be directed to Rachel Olsen or Todd Richardson, Academic Advisor of the 2025 Spring Conference, at rolsen@willacather.org or toddrichardson@unomaha.edu.