Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)

Reinterpreting the Pavelka Farmstead | National Willa Cather Center - Red Cloud, NE "We turned to leave the cave; Ántonia and I went up the stairs first, and the children waited. We were standing outside talking, when they all came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of...

Celebrate the 75th anniversary Gwendolyn Brooks's Pulitzer-winning collection ANNIE ALLEN with a special folio in this month's issue of POETRY magazine!

The folio includes "Beverly Hills, Chicago" our . https://bit.ly/4gnaN2x

This weekend will be the final showings at the Spoon River House Festival! Let the ghost of Edgar Lee Masters take you on an imagined journey to Spoon River, Illinois!

Come to the Hyde Park house where Edgar Lee Masters wrote the classic Spoon River Anthology. This final show is the last of a two-weekend festival celebrating this iconic work from the 1910s.

Shows are Friday, Saturday and Sunday!

All shows begin at 7 PM and are followed by artist talkback and reception with light refreshments.

🎟️Get your tickets!
https://form.jotform.com/241985335691164

Join us September 26-28 for ECOS: A Chicago Latine Poetry Festival celebrating Chicago’s relationship with and influence on Latine poetry!

ECOS will feature a variety of poetry-related events for all ages across four Chicago neighborhoods.

Learn more and register for ECOS events: https://bit.ly/3AXCGhL

MEMBER NEWS
• Janet Ruth Heller published “Burns Night” and “Power Company.” in Five Fleas (3 June 2024): https://fivefleas.blogspot.com/ and“The Poet’s Caste” and “Heat Wave.” in Leaf #4 (31 July 2024): 3, 42. https://leafjournal.io/leaf-issue-four-has-arrived/
• David Radavich was honored this summer for his 17 years of service as coordinator of the White Mice Poetry Contest for the International Lawrence Durrell Society at the Society’s conference in Athens, Greece.
• Wanted: Member News
What did everybody do this summer? Inquiring minds want to know! Send your news to Ms. NewsMail at [email protected]
• Such A Bargain!
Tired of the annual chore of paying dues to SSML each year? Consider a life membership of $1,000 and this pesky chore will be gone forever! Make your check out to The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and send it to
Dr. Roger Bresnahan, Secretary-Treasurer
P. O. Box 4813
East Lansing, MI 48826-4813.

Call for Proposals: From Fargo to Hawkins: Exploring 21st Century Midwestern Culture
Midwestern culture in the 2000-2025 era entered a distinct phase. The ubiquity of the internet, the coming of I-phones, the demise of movie rental stores, the collapse of once-powerful urban newspapers, the thinning out of the cinema infrastructure, the fragmentation of media spaces, and the persistence and decline of institutions of regional culture all transformed the Midwest’s media and cultural landscape. Hastings College Press seeks proposals exploring all of these developments and various aspects of Midwestern culture throughout the first quarter-decade of the twenty-first century. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the Omaha-based movies of Alexander Payne, the Golden Age of television or prestige TV (did it pass the Midwest by?), the friction between a postmodern v. a traditional Midwest and the collapse of metanarratives, the creation of new literary journals (and their termination), new literary voices such as J. Ryan Stradal, the rise of new Muslim voices (--that novel set in Indiana, can’t remember at moment), the complexities of Rust Belt identity, Native American media (“Reservation Dogs”)) and writers (David Trauer), Barack Obama’s Kansas and Chicago, the television series “Fargo,” the Indiana of “Stranger Things,” how the Midwest was excluded from the Marvel Universe, Cleveland jokes (on “Thirty Rock” and elsewhere), the rise and exhaustion of trauma plots, essayists like Meghan O’Gieblyn, Roxanne Gay, and Debra Marquart, the emergence of gay rights themes (“Boys Don’t Cry”), Covid battles in the Midwest, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in Oberlin and Iowa City, the Caitlyn Clark media phenomena, the effective end of Prairie Home Companion, the free speech debate (the University of Chicago statement) as intertwined with CRT and wokeness, the “pretendian” controversy and Native American identity, the weakening of traditional Midwestern masculinity, and the “middle-ness” (or Midwest-ness) of Middle Earth and the Shire in the LOTR trilogy. Please send vita and 300-word proposals to [email protected], who will edit the collection to be published by Hastings College Press in 2026. Proposal deadline January 1, 2025.
Contact Email
[email protected]
URL
https://sites.google.com/hastings.edu/hastings-college-press/calls-for-proposals

Call for Submissions: The Great Lakes Anthology
Overview: The Great Lakes loom large in our collective imagination and the cultural fabric of the Rust Belt. As the largest freshwater system in the world, the lakes have long powered the region’s manufacturing operations and provided an economic and societal lifeline for the communities that formed around them. While often viewed as distinct bodies of water, they exist as a slow flowing river from Lake Superior onward. In turn, Rust Belt communities as far as Buffalo and Duluth and as seemingly different as a small coastal township and a city as large as Chicago share something in common: their relationship to a lake that sustains and embodies them.
The Great Lakes Anthology will explore this inherent interconnectedness of the Rust Belt through the bodies of water that define us, and will highlight the unique and shared experiences between authors and the lakes.
Coming in mid 2026 from Belt Publishing, The Great Lakes Anthology will be edited by Chicago Review of Books Editor-In-Chief Michael Welch. We’re looking for a wide range of contributions that speak to your personal relationship with the lake(s), the ways your community has been shaped and built alongside the water, and the rich past and undefined future of our lakes and coastal communities in the era of advancing climate change.
What We’re Looking For:
• Nonfiction personal essays between 1,000 and 4,000 words
• Longform narrative journalism between 1,000 and 4,000 words
• Select poetry
We’re open to all interpretations of the prompt, including topics such as:
• Personal reflections on the influence the Great Lakes have on our individual and collective imaginations as well as identifying with the region
• How the Great Lakes shaped our communities and how we exist alongside the lakes
• Stories about working, playing, and traveling on the lakes and along their shores
• Threats to our Great Lakes in the era of climate change, including invasive species, increased flooding, challenges to tribal sovereignty, and access to fresh water
How to Submit: Please email your submission to [email protected] by January 31, 2025. Reprints are welcome. Contributors will be paid an honorarium and a copy of the anthology.

Congratulations to our winning authors.

Congratulations to Gretchen Lida!

No layoff
from this
condensery.

—Lorine Niedecker, with the for Labor Day and Be Kind to Editors and Writers Month. https://bit.ly/4dWiKuh

Visit fourthgenre.org/submit

Winner of the SSML MidAmerica Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Midwestern Literature Philip Levine.

Episode 76: Philip Levine, What Work Is - Poetry for All In this episode, we read and discuss Philip Levine's most famous poem, "What Work Is." We consider his deft use of the second-person perspective, the sociability and narrative energy of his poetry, and his deep concern for the insecurity that defines the lives of so working-class laborers. Click her...

We have some VERY EXCITING news to announce! The 17th International Fitzgerald Society Conference will be held next June 22-28, 2025 at the New School in NYC!

Below is the call for papers. Obviously we have a very important centennial to celebrate next year, but we also want to pay attention to themes and issues relevant to the Fitzgeralds in the Big Apple (everything from B&D to "The Rich Boy" to "My Lost City" to "The Lost Decade" and tons we're forgetting...)

We will announce much more detail on lodging and "extracurricular" events in the next few months, but for now we want to invite scholars and fans to begin working on proposals. Abstracts will be due November 15, 2024... which is appropriate since that's James L.W. West III's birthday.

We're excited too to announce our organizing committee, which includes site director Anne Margaret Daniel and program director Maggie Gordon Froehlich, with the assistance of Ross Tangedal (our homage to how Matthew J Bruccoli always bylined his editorial projects). We also have Walter Raubicheck, Brooke di Spirito, and Nilla Park working on a Long Island excursion. We are also looking at both pre- and post-conference excursions for attendees who might want an even wider circumference of Fitzgerald adventures.

Please send your abstracts to the Fitzgerald Society gmail at [email protected]. You can send any questions to [email protected].

Online Poetry Workshop with Poet Donny Winter — Friends of Roethke Foundation Join us for this generative poetry writing workshop with Donny online via Zoom.

Meet Jean Prokott, poet laureate of Rochester, Minnesota and a recently announced 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

With her fellowship, Prokott will examine how mental health impacts groups differently, including teenagers, BIPOC & LGBTQ+ individuals, veterans, & underserved populations.

To learn more, visit https://poets.org/academy-american-poets-2024-poet-laureate-fellows

Zitkála-Šá (1876-1938), AKA Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Lakota writer, editor, composer, and activist from South Dakota, has been honored with a 2024 U.S. commemorative quarter.

The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) and his family from 1874 to 1891. It was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the American High Gothic style. Clemens biographer Justin Kaplan has called it “part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock.” Photo by

Theodore Roethke’s Childhood Home: A Brief History — Friends of Roethke Foundation Read about the poet's childhood home and why we need your help to maintain it.

Poetry Reading Live-Streamed tonight!
Going live at 6:45 on our page. 20 poets, people, 20!

Kenosha Poet Laureate Project Chapbook Reading
6:30 at Blue House Books, 5915 6th Ave, Kenosha

A fine 2010 interview with Louise Erdrich.

The Art of Fiction No. 208   O Only one passenger train per day makes the Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo, North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like s*x between two strange...

1962 newspaper ad for a reading by Carl Sandburg in Seattle.

PARTNER EVENT💫 CLHOF Fuller Award Ceremony: Patricia Smith
Thursday, July 11 at 6PM
@ The Poetry Foundation - 61 W Superior St

Co-presented with the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, American Writers Museum, and Guild Literary Complex, the ceremony will present Chicago poet Patricia Smith with the Fuller Award for her lifetime contributions to literature. Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young will lead a lineup of presenters that includes Nora Brooks Blakely, Reginald Gibbons, Poetry Out Loud National Champion Niveah Glover, Adrian Matejka, Marc Smith, and Jamila Woods. Lynne Thompson will moderate a conversation with Ms. Smith at the end of the program.

Visit the link in our bio for RSVP + info.✨

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. ~Ernest Hemingway

(Book: Across the River and into the Trees https://amzn.to/3sYQBzO)

Jon Lauck, here with Rachel Price at our 2024 symposium, is President-elect of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. https://www.facebook.com/jon.lauck

The 2023 winner of SSML's MidAmerica Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Midwestern Literature, Lauck is also founding president of the Midwestern History Association, associate editor and book review editor of the Middle West Review, an adjunct professor of history and political science at the University of South Dakota, and the author or editor of several books, including The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.

Member News pt. 2
• Beginning with the 2024 volumes of MidAmerica and Midwestern Miscellany, Patricia Oman becomes editor of MidAmerica and Chair of SSML’s Editorial Committee.
• Congratulations to William Barillas, who joins 2024 SSML President Jon K. Lauck as Vice-President/President Elect. Gretchen Comcowich and Michael Kim Roos will be delegates to the Executive Advisory Council.
• We are saddened to report that longtime SSML member Pauline Gordon Adams died at home on January 16, 2024, at 101 years of age. Pauline attended the first SSML meeting in 1971 and until very recently had attended and often presented at every subsequent meeting. Some of you may remember her very engaging presentations with Marilyn Culpepper and Emma “Jerry” Thornton. A few years ago, SSML honored Pauline with the Founders Award for her scholarly contributions, service, and generosity to SSML.
• Congratulations to Linda Nemec Foster and her husband Tony, who will celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary with family this summer in their favorite city, Krakow, Poland. As the inaugural poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Linda was interviewed recently for the Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids project. Also, for the third year in a row, Linda’s work has been honored in Ireland. Linda’s poem, “June Wedding in the West of Ireland: North of Connemara, East of the Oceans Waves,” was awarded a prize in an international competition sponsored by the Fish Anthology. The judge, acclaimed poet Billy Collins, selected Linda’s poem to be among the top ten award-winners from over 2,160 submissions. The award includes publication in the annual anthology and an invitation to read at the West Cork Literary Festival in July, 2024.

Member News pt. 1
• Janet Ruth Heller has published several poems this spring. Her senryu, “Yoga Class,” appeared in tsuri-doro #20 (March/April 2024, p. 31). Her haiku, “Sukkot Moon,” appeared in Presence #78 (March 2024, p. 40). Her tanka, “Your Gentle Words, was published in Ribbons 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2024, p. 40). Another haiku, “Clouds and Ribs,” appeared in Blithe Spirit 34.2 (May 2024, p. 29).
• Peggy Rozga published her new collection of poems, Restoring Prairie, with Cornerstone Press in May of 2024.
• Congratulations to our 2024 David D. Anderson Award winner, Patrick Kindig, on his new job: Assistant Professor, English Department, United States Naval Academy.

Call for Papers: MidAmerica 2024
The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature welcomes essays for the 2024 issue of MidAmerica, the annual peer-reviewed journal of the society.
Submissions should be 2,500-5,000 words and focus on some aspect of Midwestern literature or culture (broadly defined) or on a Midwestern author or publication.
We welcome essays on literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies, and both traditional and innovative views of the Midwest.
See ssml.org for submission instructions. Contributors must be members of the Society before publication. The submission deadline is July 1, 2024. Questions should be directed to the editor, Patricia Oman [email protected]

THE 2025 MARK TWAIN AWARD GOES TO ANA CASTILLO

Ana Castillo is the forty-seventh winner of the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature, given annually by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature since 1980. She will be presented with the award at the 2025 SSML Symposium to be held in spring 2025 (dates TBA) at Kellogg Center of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Past winners include Gwendolyn Brooks, Ted Kooser, Tim O’Brien, Gerald Vizenor, and our 2024 winner, Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee).

Chicago has figured significantly in the life and work of American Book Award winner Ana Castillo. Born, raised, and educated in the city, she is the author of more than fifteen works of fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction, many of which evoke her Chicago experience. Her novels Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999) and Watercolor Women/Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (2005) are set in Chicago. Her native city also figures in some of the stories in Loverboys (1990), as well as in her memoir in essays, Black Dove, Mama, Mi’jo, and Me (2018). Her “Chi-Town Born and Bred, Twentieth Century Girl Propelled with Flare into the Third Millennium” has been called her homage to her hometown; one critic has opined that her poem, “I Ask the Impossible,” evokes the voice of Carl Sandburg.

Ana Castillo was educated at Northeastern University (BA), the University of Chicago (MA), and the University of Bremen (PhD). She has served as a writer-in-residence for the Illinois Arts Council and been elected to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She has taught at Malcolm X College in Chicago and later held the first Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. Her latest book is Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home (2023).