Western Kentucky University’s English Club is an SGA sponsored student-run organization. The Club hosts events of its own invention and sponsors other events for the English Department. We welcome all English majors to join.

We meet weekly during the Fall and Spring semesters. If you want to join but have a busy schedule, don’t sweat it! The meetings are planned based on what is most convenient for each member. The projects and contests we organize reflect the ideas of our members. So, bring any idea to a meeting and grab a slice of pizza!

Today, the English Club is a student-run organization designed around the collective vision of the group. It's been over eighty years since the Club was founded and a lot has changed. The English Club is an ever-growing, ever-changing, ever-expanding collective of individuals who strive to see their creative ideals come to fruition. We accept anybody and everybody. Interested? Sign up on the Listserv.

***

Dr. Jim Flynn, in his "A Centennial History of WKU's English Department," gives us some insight on the formation of the English Club.

In 1924, the English Club was founded by Dr. Lieper; later its name was changed to the Lieper English Club in his honor.  As Dr. Willson Wood, in his manuscript history of the department points out, up until the 1960’s regular attendance of club meetings was expected of all English majors and also faculty members.  But by the ‘60’s, Dr. Wood remarks ruefully, “It became smart not to do what one was supposed to do."  An undated write-up about the club, probably from the early 1930’s, gives this account of the English Club’s recent activities:

The work of the club this year has been devoted to the treatment of a diversity of modern subjects, including the study of the lives and works of such contemporary authors as William Butler Yeats, George William Russell, Carl Sandburg, and John Masefield, the study of the development of the theatre with emphasis on the Little Theatre movement in America, and a series of programs on World War literature.

An admirable contribution of the club during the year to the activities of the college was the English Club chapel program on February 18th.  The program was in [the] form of a treatment of Thomas Carlyle’s philosophical collection of essays, “Heroes and Hero Worship,” and was effectively carried out by interpretations of the divisions of the books by members of the English Club.

***

While we no longer pour over then contemporary, now modern, texts in argument, we do engage the literary world firsthand. The Annual Goldenrod Poetry Contest has been building momentum, bringing poets to Western and Western poets to the world.