20th Annual Salute To Robert Penn Warren Set For April 21-22

March 29, 2007

Bowling Green, Ky. -The 20th Annual Salute to Robert Penn Warren will be April 21-22 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 & Letters.
           
Activities begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, April 21, with a showing of the movie “All the King’s Men” in Cherry Hall 125, to be followed by a discussion. At 2:15 p.m., Victor Strandberg will chair presentations on Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in the 21st Century. Presenters include James A. Grimshaw Jr., Charlotte Beck, Joseph R. Millichap and James A. Perkins. At 3:30 p.m., the winning essays of a high school essay contest on Warren will be read.
           
Activities on Sunday, April 22, will take place in Mass Media and Technology Hall, beginning with a 10 a.m. breakfast bar. At 10:30 a.m., a series of presentations will review the past 20 years of the Robert Penn Warren Center. There will be a box lunch at 12:30 p.m. Reservations for the breakfast and box lunch can be made by contacting Mary Ellen Miller at mary.miller@wku.edu.
           
At 2 p.m., the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism will be presented to David Rosen of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. That will be followed by a dramatic reading of Warren’s fact-based poems by Patricia Minton Taylor and Craig Taylor. There will be a reception and book signing at 3 p.m.
           
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 WKU 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.