National Willa Cather Center News

Despite the staffing difficulties created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Willa Cather Center was able to reconfigure two summer internships to be entirely remote while still giving each intern valuable museum work experience. Our two interns this summer are Alise Perault and Braxton Benes, and they are working on assessing our educational resources, as well as revising our walking tour brochure, and prairie signage. Both Alise and Braxton have a passion for learning and museum work, and we thought it would be fun to share a little bit about them.

In her invited lecture, "When the World Broke in Two: America on the Cusp of the 1920s," Ryan will situate Cather's novel within the time period of creation and publication, a period that foreshadowed the turmoils of the 1920s.

Join us as we welcome Alex Ross back to Red Cloud as keynote speaker for the 65th annual Willa Cather Spring Conference.

An avid reader and a frequent visitor to Red Cloud, Frank Markley has been a member of the Willa Cather Foundation for nearly forty years.

For the month of April, we have invited noted authors, poets, actors, artists, musicians, filmmakers and other luminaries to share their appreciative readings of Cather's verse.

1918 was a pivotal year for Willa Cather. This letter, written to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, conveys the hardships of war time and illness, but is also peppered with joys, including the publication of "My Antonia."

It isn’t widely recognized that writing poetry represented some of Willa Cather’s earliest literary endeavors. Even after establishing herself as a writer of significance, Cather continued to write poetry and to reshape the presentation of her earliest published poems. In efforts to share Cather’s poetry more broadly and deliver meaningful digital content to Cather fans during this unprecedented time of social distancing, the National Willa Cather Center is hosting virtual poetry readings beginning April 1 in honor of National Poetry Month.

Join us for a visit to Taos, New Mexico in November at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House.

We've been busy in the Collections & Archives at the National Willa Cather Center as several important gifts have recently joined our collections.

Spring is a perfect time to bring students to Webster county to tour Willa Cather sites both in town and in the country. Students reading My Ántonia or learning about Nebraska history will benefit from visiting places featured in their history books or Cather’s famous novel. Educators can find information about school tour itineraries and pricing here.