Montgomery County Literary Arts Council

2008 ANNUAL WALT WHITMAN BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

THURSDAY, MAY 1st

Walt Whitman Panel of Scholars
4:00 PM, Lone Star College-Montgomery Library

Four of the nation’s finest Walt Whitman Scholars will discuss various aspects of  the Father of American Poetry.

Gathering of Poets Reading/Book Fair
7:00 PM, Coronelli's Villa Italia (on the square in Conroe)

Over twenty distinguished published poets, creative writing professors, and community literary leaders will read their favorite Walt Whitman poems, as well as one of their own works.

Several of Walt Whitman’s favorite Opera selections will be performed.

Autographed books of the participating poets and scholars will be available for purchase.

Both events are Free to the public and made possible through the cooperation and support of Lone Star College-Montgomery’s SWIRL, the Conroe Commission on the Arts & Culture, and Montgomery County Literary Arts Council.  For more information: contact: 

Dave Parsons 936 524-6537   •   Alicia Bankston 936 273-7257   •   Cliff Hudder 936 273-7399

Scholar's Panel

Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Texas A&M, M. Jimmie Killingsworth received his PhD from the University of Tennessee in 1979 and taught writing, technical communication, rhetoric, and American literature at four universities before coming to A&M in 1990. His publications include the scholarly books Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (1989), Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (1992, co-authored with Jackie Palmer, his wife, a specialist in scientific and environmental communication and Senior Lecturer in English at A&M), Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication (1992, co-authored with his old roommate and hiking buddy, Michael Gilbertson), and The Growth of Leaves of Grass: The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies (1993), and a textbook, Information in Action: A Guide to Technical Communication (Allyn and Bacon, 1996), the second edition co-authored again with Jackie Palmer (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).  Killingsworth's latest books are Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). He is continuing critical study on the rhetoric and poetics of place, as well as pursuing new interests in creative nonfiction, with a special interest on nature writing and memoirs.

Dr. Ezra Greenspan is the Chairman of the Dept. of Humanities at Southern Methodist University and the author of: Walt Whitman and the American Reader,  George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher, “Song of Myself”: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, William Wells Brown: A Reader (forthcoming in 2008 from University of Georgia Press).

Ezra Greenspan is a literary and cultural historian who studies the history of print culture in its various manifestations in the United States. He is interested, in particular, in the central activities (such as writing, reading, printing, and publishing) and institutions (such as libraries, bookstores, and schools) of American print culture. His central figure has long been Walt Whitman, but he also has an active scholarly interest in the culture of letters of nineteenth-century African Americans. He is currently working on a comprehensive literary biography of the most important and versatile nineteenth-century African American writer, William Wells Brown. As an undergraduate and graduate teacher, he offers a variety of courses on the canonized and minority literary cultures of the United States. He is the co-editor of the journal Book History.

Dr. Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University has published numerous books on Walt Whitman as well as diverse literary topics: The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. University of California Press, 2005, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself.  University of California Press, 2000 (paperback edition), Walt Whitman:  The Song of Himself.  University of California Press, 1999, Ed. with intro., Frank Norris's McTeague.  Oxford University Press, 1995, Lost in the Customhouse:  Authorship in the American Renaissance.  University of Iowa Press, 1993, Ed. with intro., Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  Oxford University Press, 1990, Emily Dickinson:  The Poet on the Second Story.  Cambridge University Press, 1986, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse.  University of North Carolina Press, 1982, Walt Whitman's Champion:  William Douglas O'Connor.  Texas A&M University Press, 1978, Ed. with intro., Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman.  Duke University Press, 1975.

Dr. Loving has published hundreds of reviews and articles and is the recipient of an extraordinary number of awards and honors.

Dr. Randall Watson is the author of Las Delaciones del Sueño, published by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico, and The Sleep Accusations, recipient of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize in Poetry at Eastern Washington University Press. Petals, published under the pseudonym Ellis Reece, was the winner of the 2006-07 Quarterly West Novella Competition, and is currently available in the Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue. He recently edited the Weight of Addition: A Texas Poetry Anthology published by Mutibulis Press. Watson has taught poetry workshops at several institutions, including: The University of Houston, Houston Community College, and Inprint, Inc.