Southeast Missouri State University’s 2022 Faulkner and Ward Conference, which is sponsored by the Missouri Humanities Council, will bring scholars from eight countries and various universities from across the United States together to present their academic research about writers William Faulkner and Jesmyn Ward.
The Center for Faulkner Studies invites the public to attend a keynote address titled “Race, Carcerality and the (Im)Possibility of Black Futures” by Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman of Brown University. The free event will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 20 at the University Center on the main campus of Southeast Missouri State University.
“We are excited to pair these two very different authors who both write about their native Mississippi,” said Dr. Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies. “Dr. Abdur-Rahman’s talk will help people learn more about the common themes and different approaches of two award-winning important writers.”
The biennial conference offers a comparison of Faulkner’s work to other world-renowned authors. Past authors featured at the conference include Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jesmyn Ward, this year’s selection, is an American novelist and two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction for her two novels Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice.
“Jesmyn Ward writes about the rural and small-town African-American experience in the twenty-first century Gulf Coast Mississippi,” said Rieger. “This provides an interesting comparison and contrast with Faulkner’s rural characters of the other end of the state.”
The Center for Faulkner Studies is devoted to the study of William Faulkner who won the Noble Prize in Literature in 1949. The Center was established at Southeast Missouri State University in 1989 under the leadership of its founding director, Dr. Robert Hamblin, following the University's acquisition of the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection of William Faulkner Materials, assembled over a 30-year period by Louis Daniel (L.D.) Brodsky of St. Louis. The collection is one of the preeminent Faulkner collections in the world and attracts scholars from around the world to the Southeast campus.
For questions about the event, please contact the Center for Faulkner Studies via email at cfs@semo.edu or by calling Dr. Christopher Rieger at (573) 651-2620.
“We are excited to pair these two very different authors who both write about their native Mississippi,” said Dr. Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies. “Dr. Abdur-Rahman’s talk will help people learn more about the common themes and different approaches of two award-winning important writers.”
The biennial conference offers a comparison of Faulkner’s work to other world-renowned authors. Past authors featured at the conference include Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jesmyn Ward, this year’s selection, is an American novelist and two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction for her two novels Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice.
“Jesmyn Ward writes about the rural and small-town African-American experience in the twenty-first century Gulf Coast Mississippi,” said Rieger. “This provides an interesting comparison and contrast with Faulkner’s rural characters of the other end of the state.”
The Center for Faulkner Studies is devoted to the study of William Faulkner who won the Noble Prize in Literature in 1949. The Center was established at Southeast Missouri State University in 1989 under the leadership of its founding director, Dr. Robert Hamblin, following the University's acquisition of the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection of William Faulkner Materials, assembled over a 30-year period by Louis Daniel (L.D.) Brodsky of St. Louis. The collection is one of the preeminent Faulkner collections in the world and attracts scholars from around the world to the Southeast campus.
For questions about the event, please contact the Center for Faulkner Studies via email at cfs@semo.edu or by calling Dr. Christopher Rieger at (573) 651-2620.