Approximately 100 teachers from 19 states will visit Jackson in July for a week-long workshop hosted by Millsaps College and the Eudora Welty House to study the world, characters and events that sparked the imagination of one of America’s greatest authors.
“I hope encountering Eudora Welty’s world will excite participants and suggest new ways of approaching Welty’s fiction,” said Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps’ Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence and Welty biographer.
“Our workshop will help teachers to link the study of literature to the concrete world of a writer’s daily experience.”
Two separate sessions of the workshop are scheduled for July 6-11 and July 20-25.
The K-12 educators come from New York, Vermont, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Oregon, Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, California, Colorado, Wisconsin and Indiana to attend the workshop, Eudora Welty’s Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer’s Imagination. The workshop is one of only 20 programs funded nationwide by the National Endowment for the Humanities in its Landmarks of American History and Culture Series.
Marrs is one of several well-known historians and literary critics who will direct the workshop. Others include Peggy Prenshaw, Minrose Gwin, Alferdteen Harrison, Michael Kreying, Leslie McLemore, Rebecca Mark, Pearl McHaney, Noel Polk, Harriet Pollack and Charles Sallis.
"The goal of our Landmarks Workshop is to give school teachers an in-depth experience with important topics in American history, an experience they can then share with their students,” said Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Workshop participants will visit Welty’s home and garden, the Medgar Evers House and the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum to learn more about the world in which Welty lived and wrote.
