Bowling Green, Ky. - The 19th Annual Robert Penn Warren Celebration will be April 22-23 at Western Kentucky University.

The celebration is sponsored by WKU’s Robert Penn Warren Committee, the English Department and the dean of the Potter College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

On Saturday, April 22, in Cherry Hall room 125, there will be a reading of winning high school and college essays from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. From 3:15 p.m. to 5 p.m., there will be a mini-conference on “Fiction to Film: The Artistic Challenge,” moderated by Bedford Clark of Texas A & M University in College Station. Sessions include “Robert Penn Warren’s ‘Band of Angels’: How About a TV Mini-Series” by Mark Miller of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts; “A Proposed Film Treatment of ‘World Enough and Time’” by Randy Runyon of Miami University of Ohio; and “Fiction to Film: When ‘Telling’ is Superior to ‘Showing’” by James Perkins of Westminster College.

Activities on Sunday, April 23, will take place in Mass Media and Technology Hall Auditorium. At 2 p.m., there will be several announcements, including essay contest winners, a significant gift from Rosanna Warren and Gabriel Warren, and the presentation of the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award. That will be followed by the presentation “Robert Penn Warren’s ‘The Legacy of the Civil War’ by Warren’s literary executor, John Burt of Brandies University. A reception and book signing will follow the presentation.
All events are free and open to the public.

“Robert Penn Warren is by anybody’s definition the most distinguished literary figure Kentucky has ever produced and Kentucky has produced some very, very distinguished literary figures,” said Mary Ellen Miller, an English professor at Western and coordinator of the Warren Center. “He is the only person in history to win a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry and he won two in poetry. He was the nation’s first official poet laureate and he is as well known in criticism as he is in poetry and fiction.”

Warren’s wife, Eleanor Clark, presented his personal working library to WKU several years ago and it is now housed in the Kentucky Library.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For more information, contact Mary Ellen Miller, (270) 745-5721.

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