Events/Calendar

 

Wed, Feb 3

 

AWWNM CELEBRATES A 4th BIRTHDAY! with
ACTRESS BRENDA’S PORTRAYAL OF EUDORA WELTY’S WORK

Brenda Currin
Brenda Currin

In celebration of AWWNM’s 4th anniversary, Obie (Off Broadway) theatrical award winner, actress Brenda Currin, will perform the theatrical fantasia portion of her one-woman show “June Recital” based on the work of Pulitzer winner Eudora Welty (1909-2001).

       Obie (Off Broadway) theatrical award winner, actress Brenda Currin will help AWWNM celebrate embarking on a fourth year honoring America’s premier women writers, historical and contemporary.
        Currin will perform the theatrical fantasia portion of “June Recital” (AKA Sister & Miss Lexie) based on a short story by 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty (1909-2001). The Fantasia was adapted by David Kaplan and set to the the adagio and rondo section of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Currin explained.
        Mississippi native Welty is the beloved author of short stories and novels about the American South. In addition to the Pulitzer, Welty was awarded America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Legion of Honor from France. Welty is also a skilled photographer.
        Currin met and interviewed Welty in New York. “We started to talk about Stella Rondo and the characters in her short story “Why I live at the P.O.” (Post Office). We both started to laugh as if they were members of our family, and it just broke the ice,” Curriin remembered.
        Described by a literary peer as “a sure renderer of dialect” Welty so brilliantly captures the absolute tones and cadences of her friends, relatives and strangers with such mastery that readers can almost hear them speaking off the page.
        Currin’s film credits include: In Cold Blood and The World According to Garp. Her stage work includes: Three Penny Opera, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You, and many others. She has worked with actresses Estelle Parsons and Olympia Dukakis.
        Currin grew up in North Carolina. She received her BA degree from the University of Kansas, and her MA in anthropology from Hunter College.
        Currin explains her love for Welty’s work by citing the novel “Delta Wedding”. “I loved those ladies from my childhood in Oxford, N.C. playing bridge at 8 a.m., fully dressed with lipstick and nail polish, smoking and drinking Coca Cola,” Currin said.
        *50-state Project honors women writers in Mississippi, Missouri, Montana and Nebraska.


Wed, Mar 9

 

LET’S KEEP DANCING! PULITZER WINNER SARAH KAUFMAN TALKS ABOUT WRITING CULTURE

Sarah Kaufman
Sarah Kaufman

Pulitzer Prize winner Sarah Kaufman, dance critic for The Washington Post, will share her 20 years of experiences writing about arts, “cultural” events and sports--- with grace.

        Texas- born Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sarah Kaufman, dance critic for The Washington Post, will on Wed March 9, share her 20 years of experience writing about arts, sports and culture.
        She was, in 2010, the first dance critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 35 years
        NBC News and The PBS News Hour have featured her work. She has done onstage interviews with celebrities and newsmakers for the Smithsonian museums, the Goethe Institut, and City Arts & Lectures since she began writing for the WP in 1996.
        While an undergraduate at University of Maryland, work at a ballet school, triggered her first published dance reviews
        “As a young survivor of open-heart surgery, I learned that life is fragile—and rebuildable. Ballet paired well with my recovery and my writing. I learned to perfect small details, get the rhythm right; smoothing and refining and making it all look easy”, Kaufman explained.
        “I apply my sense of grace and movement everywhere in my writing: seeing the (bicycle) Tour de France as art, analyzing politicians’ body language, and examining pop music’s Lady Gaga as a cultural phenomenon” she added.
        Raised near Washington, D.C., Kaufman served as a US Senate page at the age of 15. At that time, pages lived in an attic of the Library of Congress—a space now utilized as an office-reception area by the Poetry Center.
        A year as an exchange student in Cannes, France followed.
        She won a scholarship to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where she earned a Masters degree. She began working for newspapers in Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo.
        She is married to a trust and estates attorney with whom she parents three children in Takoma Park, MD.
        Her just-released first book nonfiction “The Art of Grace” explores the many ways grace, or the absence of grace, affects our daily lives.
        *50-state Project honors women writers in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa.


Wed, Apr 6

 

STAND BY YOUR MAN: FIRST LADIES CAMPAIGNING

Patricia Krider
Patricia Krider

Before women got to vote in America in 1920, wives of presidential candidates were seen but not heard. The campaign trail demands much more now from candidate spouses. Patricia Krider, Executive Director of the First Ladies Museum and Library in Canton, Ohio will speak to that transformed arc at noon April 6 in the McLendon Room

        Who could forget Nancy Reagan’s mesmerized focus on her Ronnie’s (Ronald Reagan) every activity as he campaigned for the Presidency?
        
Decades before Mrs. Reagan , wives of Presidential candidates did little to actually campaign with their husbands on the hustings. But after Mrs. Reagan set the pace, wives of Presidential hopefuls became, and continue to be, very actively involved in on- the -scene campaigning.
        Patricia Krider, executive Director of the First Ladies Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio, will review that fascinating historical arc.
        Before 1920, women were literally in the background because, by law, they were ineligible to vote because of their gender.
        Nineteenth century wives “might wave a handkerchief from a window during a parade”, or “ delight the crowd by sending them a winsome smile from the front porch of her own home”. Krider said.
        “But the right to vote also gave women the opportunity to take a dynamic role in the political arena. Today a potential First Lady must multi-task while campaigning. She must know her husband’s issues and concerns while answering questions about her own causes and activities”, Krider said.
        “The media still scrutinize her clothes and hair, but now they also report on what potential assets she brings to a presidency”, Krider continued.
        “Dolly Madison was the first openly successful political First Lady who hosted the first public Inaugural Ball. Helen Taft worked so tirelessly on Howard’s Presidential campaign that President Theodore Roosevelt accused her of aspiring to the Presidency on her on behalf!” Krider added.
        Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were probably the first true “team” of campaigners—giving the astute Eleanor a public independence as a politically active woman never seen before. Eleanor was the first candidate’s wife to speak publicly at a party convention.
         Krider is a magna cum laude graduate of Ashland University and also holds degrees from Walsh University and Stark State college.
         *50-state Project honors women writers in Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho.


Thur, Oct 20

 

MEET NPR’S Senior Business Editor
Marilyn Geewax “Here & Now”!

PMarilyn Geewax
Marilyn Geewax

Marilyn Geewax, award-winning Senior Business Editor for National Public Radio, where she assigns, writes and edits, will discuss her career and women writing about business: noon, Thursday, Oct, 20, 2016 in the McLendon Room of the National Press Club. Ms. Geewax appears regularly to discuss economic issues on NPR’s midday Here & Now program.

        Marilyn Geewax, Senior Business Editor for National Public Radio, always has her finger on the pulse of business, as she assigns, writes and edits national stories.  She is an award-winning  regular contributor to NPR’s midday Here and Now show.  She has traveled the world covering business  and economic issues, filing news stories from China, Japan, South Africa and Europe.
        She will discuss her personal career: how she came up through the print journalism ranks as national economics correspondent for Cox Newspapers’ Washington bureau, as well as her work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she also served on the editorial board. She got her start as a business reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal.
        She is a native of Youngstown Ohio.
        Her work on the foreclosure-crisis contributed to NPR’s 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for hard news , and she was also recognized with a 2009 Heywood Broun Award.     
        A graduate of The Ohio State University, she earned a Master’s degree from Georgetown She also won a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard.
        
*50-state Project honors women writers in Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey.


American Women Writers National Museum
PO Box 22365
Houston, Texas 77227-2365

awwnm1@gmail.com
info@americanwomenwritersnationalmuseum.org

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