Phoenix Award

The Phoenix award is awarded bi-annually to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of Welty studies. Recipients of the Phoenix are:

2021-22 - Mae Miller Claxton
2019-20 - David McWhirter
2017-18 - Sarah Gilbreath Ford
2015-16 - Julia Eichelberger
2013-14 - Pearl McHaney
2011-12 - Suzan Harrison
2009-10 - Rebecca Mark
2007-08 - Harriet Pollack
2005-06 - Gail Mortimer
2003-04 - Dawn Trouard and Carey Wall
2001-02 - Danièle Pitavy-Souques
1999-00 - Ruth D. Weston and Michael Kreyling
1997-98 - Albert Devlin and Suzanne Marrs
1995-96 - Noel Polk and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
1993-94 - Ruth Vande Kieft and William U. McDonald

The Ruth Vande Kieft Prize

The Ruth Vande Kieft Prize, sponsored by the Eudora Welty Society, is awarded annually for the best essay on Eudora Welty by a beginning scholar. The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in Eudora Welty Review.

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Send submissions via email in a word document to pmchaney@gsu.edu and include a brief curriculum vitae. Author’s name should not appear on the typescripts. Please identify essays as submissions for the Ruth Vande Kieft Prize.
Decisions about regular publication are also made at the same time as the prize decision.

Past winners:

2018 - Jill Fennell “An Economics of Apathy: Anxieties of Capital and Care in Delta Wedding"
2017 - Kelsey E. Moore "'As if a rabbit had run over her grave': Gothic Girlhood in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding"
2016 - Cliff Hudder "Race, Nature, and Decapitation in Eudora Welty's 'Curtain of Green'"
2014 - Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy “'Remember right': Disenfranchised Grief and the Commemoration of Queer Bodies in Welty’s Fiction and Life.”
2013 - Jacob Agner “A Collision of Visions: Montage and the Concept of Collision in Eudora Welty’s ‘June Recital’”
2012 - Kathryn Stelmach Artuso “Transatlantic Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen”

Eudora Welty Research Fellowship

The Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) sponsor the Eudora Welty Research Fellowship to encourage and support research use of the Eudora Welty Collection and related materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History by graduate students.

One competitive fellowship of $5,000 will be offered for research conducted in the summer. The stipend may be used to cover travel, housing, and other expenses during the recipient's stay in Jackson, Mississippi.

Additional information is available on the MDAH website.

Eudora Welty Graduate Student Travel Award

The Eudora Welty Society awards a travel grant of $250 annually to a graduate student presenting on a society-sponsored panel at the American Literature Association Conference or the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference.