Past Events

We are delighted to welcome Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley! Her 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. Join us in the bookstore following the event for a book signing. 

The talk will be broadcast live on YouTube and a recording will be available for 2 weeks after the event.

The Ollie Webb Center, Inc.'s Art of Imagination program, in collaboration with University of Nebraska Omaha professor and screenwriter Todd Richardson, has created two short films based on excerpts from two Willa Cather novels.

The first film, “Tom Outland's Story,“ is from Cather’s novel The Professor‘s House and is about discovering an ancient cliff city. The other is excerpted from My Ántonia. This film chronicles the difficulties living through Nebraska winters in the 19th century.

This event is weather-permitting and depends on partly cloudy or clear skies.

Join author and tour guide Garrett Peck as he leads a special stargazing program at the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie for our second year! As you prepare to participate in this nighttime prairie event, please do the following:

Join us for refreshments at an unveiling as we celebrate the addition of Littleton Alston‘s larger-than-life statue of Willa Cather to the collection. This piece is Alston's second cast bronze of Willa Cather, and an exact replica of the Willa Cather statue that represents Nebraska as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. The acquisition was made possible through the generosity of Jay Yost and Wade Leak, Chuck Shoemaker and Lynn Friedewald, and more than a dozen patrons who purchased one-foot statuettes in support of the acquisition.

Kick off the 70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference with a talk from Ann Lundberg, English professor and longtime interpretive ranger, about Cather at Mesa Verde.

Mark your calendars for the 70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference!

In partnership with the Nebraska Writers Collective, we are delighted to invite writers of all backgrounds to join poet Karla Hernandez Torrijos for refreshments and a free workshop focused on place-based writing. Karla will lead participants in writing exercises that incorporate selections from My Ántonia as well as work by Thomas C. Gannon and Zitkala-Sa. Through these excerpts, contemporary writers will contemplate indigenous perspectives of place juxtaposed with late 19th century settlement culture. 

Willa Cather's early novels depicting farm life explore both her memories of Nebraska and a nation grappling with rapid urbanization. In this lecture, Tracy Sanford Tucker, the director of Collections and Curation at the National Willa Cather Center, will explore Cather's complicated relationship with farm life and her place within the 20th century farm fiction genre, and will provide book recommendations about regional farm literature.

Come out to support Red Cloud's own Wade Maudlin and his band Tastydactyl! In their first performance at the Red Cloud Opera House Tastydactyl will treat the crowd to hits from the 90's and early 2000s.

We are honored and delighted to welcome acclaimed writer Karen Russell to the Red Cloud Opera House to discuss her new novel, The Antidote. Russell will sign copies of her book in the National Willa Cather Center bookstore immediately following her talk. You won't want to miss this free and in-person event! Patron Packages are also available for purchase. Click "Learn More" for details!