National Willa Cather Center News

This summer, before the exterior painting began at the Cather Second Home Guest House, we turned to the expert paint analysis provided by David Arbogast of Davenport, Iowa. David has conducted paint analysis at some of our other historic sites in recent years, including: the Burlington Depot, Pavelka Farmstead, and the Willa Cather Childhood Home (and in the early 1990s at the Miner House before it was donated to the Willa Cather Foundation by Nancy and Bernie Picchi).

Are you interested in serving on the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation? For the fiscal year of board service beginning January 1, 2025, the Foundation is accepting applications for new members of the Board. Applications are due by September 5.

Our visitor services coordinator and expert guide, Nick Powers, recently completed the Nebraska Master Naturalist Program, a week-long course of classes and activities that provides certification for its conservation and education volunteers. Classes ranged from plants and animals, to ecosystems, environmental education, and citizen science. Nick gained deeper knowledge of the different plants and animals of Nebraska, as well as conservation efforts in the state.

The collections and archives at the National Willa Cather Center have always, since our founding, played a critical role in helping our visitors gain a deeper understanding of Willa Cather. Our museum's collections rotate through our historic sites, providing context and helping readers, teachers, and students to imagine the settings of Cather’s many works set in Red Cloud.

Red Cloud's historic Burlington Depot, in service for more than sixty years before it was decommissioned by the railroad, connected Red Cloud to the larger world. The technologies and processes that enabled such a connection were managed by dozens of men (and a handful of women) under the watchful eye of the station master. We hope the new interpretation at the Depot will give visitors a glimpse of daily life at the station.

The Humanities Internship at the National Willa Cather Center offers an experiential learning opportunity for an advanced undergraduate (completed at least forty credit hours) or a graduate student in the humanities at the University of Nebraska (UNL, UNK, or UNO). It is funded through a collaboration between the University of Nebraska and the National Willa Cather Center.

The National Willa Cather Center is pleased to announce members of the second cohort of writers of the Willa Cather Writers Residency in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The program will be held October 13-27, 2024. The Willa Cather Residency aims to inspire new work by emergent writers. For more about the Willa Cather Residency, click HERE.

 

It was a beautiful, breezy afternoon on June 8 for our Willa Cather Childhood Home Rededication and Ribbon Cutting! Willa Cather Foundation leadership, project partners and supporters, Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason, and Nebraska Youth Poet Laureate Miranda Davis participated in a dedication and ribbon-cutting at the Willa Cather Childhood Home.

The Cather Family Library, as it has come to be called in the last decade or more, is another part of the National Willa Cather Center’s collection of books associated with the extended Cather family. The Cather Family Library, however, provides especially rich insights into the mind and imagination of Willa Cather. A number of books in the collection contain personalization that denotes a book belonged to Willa Cather personally, who sometimes used "Willie" or "William" when marking her copies.