Melissa Homestead’s essay “Looking at Willa Cather’s Lesbian Partnership and Domestic World: The Lesser-Told Story of Cather and Edith Lewis” was published in Literary Hub on May 18th.

Katie Schmid’s short story “The Boys” appeared in the Spring issue of South Dakota Review.

Rosemary Sekora’s essay “A Publicist’s Guide to Completing Your Book’s Marketing Questionnaire” was published on the H-Net Book Channel blog Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications.

Joy Castro taught a prose workshop and gave a reading at the University of Michigan’s Bear River Writers’ Conference, May 19-23.

Melissa Homestead is serving as the academic director of the 67th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference in Red Cloud, NE, from June 2-4. The theme of this year’s conference is “Literary Prizes: Acclaim and Controversy.”

The German Historical Museum’s cinema, the Zeughauskino in Berlin, invited Marco Abel to curate a retrospective of films by the the New Munich Group (1964-1972), a group of West German filmmakers on whose work Marco is currently writing a book. The retrospective, which included 21 short, medium-length, and feature-length films and for which Marco wrote the program notes, took place from May 7 to May 27 and started with Marco’s opening talk, “Mit Nonchalance am Abgrund: Die Neue Münchner Gruppe.”

Flatwater Shakespeare Company’s Summer 2022 production is Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Sarah Klocke of the College of St. Mary, Omaha. Steve Buhler is the dramaturg and Kelly Stage is FSC Board Chair. This brisk, 75-minute version (without intermission) will be staged at The Stables at Wyuka, 3600 “O” Street in Lincoln, June 2, 3, 5, and 8. The run continues with a tour of other outdoor venues: Trago Park, June 9; Cooper Park, June 10; Havelock Park, June 11; and James Arthur Vineyards, June 12. Showtime is 7 p.m. at all locations. Admission is charged at the Wyuka shows. Tour performances are free.

Ken Price reports that the Walt Whitman Archive has received a grant of $130,000 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to complete editorial treatment of the incoming and outgoing correspondence of Whitman. Work on the correspondence, undertaken with partners at the University of Iowa, has required a decade of steady work. The letters project was initially centered at Nebraska, then it shifted to Iowa, and now for the final year, it will return to Nebraska.  We intend to publish 605 letters in this final year, more than in any previous one, so life will be busy! Matt Cohen, Kevin McMullen, Tara Ballard, Brett Barney, Ashlyn Stewart, and others, too—with the invaluable contributions of the CDRH dev team—are determined to get over the finish line. Once there we will have published approximately 8,000 pieces of Whitman correspondence.

Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiri and Adrian Wisnicki won a highly-competitive ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant award for their joint project titled “Recovering the Histories of Land Treaties in East and Southern Africa.” The $25,000 grant runs from 10/1/2022 through 9/15/2023. The new collaborative venture emerges from their ongoing DH projects, The ARDHI Initiative and One More Voice, respectively, and will help them launch a new collaborative partnership with archives and archivists in Kenya and Britain. The results will be published in English, Kiswahili, and isiXhosa.

Adrian Wisnicki won a $350,000 NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant, one of the largest such grants awarded by the NEH in this funding cycle. Dino Felluga (Purdue), a long-time collaborator of Wisnicki’s, is the other co-PI on the grant. Karin Dalziel of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) also played a major role in the drafting of the grant. The grant will support a three-year initiative (2022-2025) centered the development of COVE: Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education, a non-profit teaching and publishing platform.

Jamaica Baldwin has won a 2023 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Father Weaver” published last year in RHINO.