Robert Penn Warren Circle Annual Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS

Robert Penn Warren Circle Annual Meeting

April 20-22, 2023

Hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Committee and the City of Guthrie

Guthrie, Kentucky

Friendship, Community, and Connections in RPW

The Circle has found a strong sense of community in its annual gathering in Guthrie. Warren, however, had a long history of shifting communities. While often categorized as a Southern writer, Warren’s life and work in fact had extraordinary range: the small town of his childhood and his memory; the South of his youth and early professional career; the time and travels in Italy and the American West that inspired some of his most beautiful poetry; and many points beyond and in between.

For this year’s meeting, we are especially interested in proposals addressing the following:

● Themes of belonging, exile, and identity

● Warren’s connections to other writers as teacher, influence, and/or supporter

● Friendship and acquaintance relationships in Warren’s fiction and poetry

● Home & family, insiders & outsiders, comings & goings, strangers & strange lands

Not later than January 31, 2023, please send proposals to Circle Secretary Kyle Taylor via email at rpwcircle@gmail.com

We invite abstracts for papers, panels, or roundtables addressing any aspect of Robert Penn Warren’s work, not just the meeting’s theme. For panel proposals, please include panel title, name and affiliation of each presenter, and individual abstracts of 50 – 100 words with paper title. For individual paper proposals, please send paper title and abstract of 50-100 words. For roundtables, please send an abstract of 50-100 words and a brief bio of each speaker.

Graduate students are welcome to propose individual papers (15 minutes in length) or panels of 3-4 speakers. If your abstract is accepted, and you wish to be considered for the Eleanor Clark Award, which carries a stipend of $100, please send your completed paper to rpwcircle@gmail.com by April 7, 2023.

Robert Penn Warren Studies, a peer-reviewed journal published by Western Kentucky University, may publish proceedings from the annual Circle meeting and is actively soliciting scholarly articles and book reviews. Having moved to an online format, we welcome contributions that take advantage of our new electronic medium. For more information, please visit the RPW Studies homepage: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/