Minutes of the Eudora Welty Society Business Meeting, 2016
May 28 American Literature Association Meeting, San Francisco, CA

Members in Attendance:
Julia Eichelberger, Harriet Pollack, Adrienne Akins Warfield, Jacob Agner, Stephen Fuller, Jean Griffith, Li Cui.

Julia Eichelberger, College of Charleston, convened our meeting following two ALA EWS sessions, Welty and Modernism and Welty and Multimedia, and after a society luncheon at Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building (Stuart Christie and Geraldine Chouard attended as well as all members listed above).

The following topics were discussed.

Our newest EWS website (http://eudoraweltysociety.org) has been established by Sarah Ford, Baylor University, who will serve as its webmaster (thank you Sarah!). Please go onto and explore this new site. We hope soon to establish an EWS Facebook page as well. We’ll be seeking photos of past society meetings to post, particularly those previously shared on former websites, now lost.

We considered possibly changing EWS by-laws so that future society business meetings might, every other year, be held at the bi-annual meeting of The Society for The Study of Southern Literature, where our membership attendance is large. We might in that way often alternate meetings at ALA and at SSSL. The change will require a society vote.

Treasurer Adrienne Akins Warfield, Mars Hill University, reports that we have $4039.65 in accounts, but only thirteen members whose dues are currently paid. We ask membership both to renew now, using the “Join” page of our new website, and also to provide current contact information for our listserve and membership lists by emailing Warfield.

At Eichelberger’s invitation, members in attendance each said a little about their current Welty works in-progress. Eichelberger proposed a possible future working retreat that would focus on sharing and advancing all of our projects underway, as a variation on our usual “papers presented” conference model.

There was a discussion of the 2015 Eudora Welty Biennial Celebration held in Jackson, Mississippi, organized by director David Kaplan in collaboration with Millsaps College, the Welty House, the Mississippi Museum of Modern Art, the New Stage Theatre, the Davis Planetarium, and others. A record of some of its events are posted on its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/weltybiennial/?fref=ts . I suggested that if we organized an EWS conference to precede a future Welty Biennial Celebration, many of us would be on location for the opening of those other events.

We welcome your comments and suggestions in response to these minutes. We remind you too to please renew your membership now and to update your contact information as well.

––Harriet Pollack, EWS VP, Bucknell University