October 19, 2005 Walt Whitman Symposium to Be Held Nov. 3

The Library of Congress Manuscript Division will present a symposium titled “Whitman and Place” at noon on Thursday, Nov. 3, in the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor, James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. This program, held in conjunction with the Library’s exhibition “Revising Himself: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass,” is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are required. The exhibition will be on display until Dec. 2 and can be viewed on the Library’s Web site at www.loc.gov/exhibits.

Topics of discussion will be “Walt Whitman in New York,” “Whitman and the Civil War” and “Whitman in Camden-Philadelphia.” Making these presentations will be Joann P. Krieg, English professor at Hofstra University; Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia; and William Pannapacker, assistant professor and Towsley Research Scholar in the English department at Hope College.

Krieg’s work on Whitman includes “Walt Whitman Here and Now” (Greenwood Press, 1986), “A Whitman Chronology” (University of Iowa Press, 1998) and “Whitman and the Irish” (University of Iowa Press, 2000). Formerly president of the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site in West Hills, N.Y., Krieg is currently at work on a study of the female voice in Whitman’s writing.

Poet and scholar Genoways is the editor of “The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII” (Iowa, 2004). Founding editor of the literary magazine Meridian, he is a contributor to the Walt Whitman Archive, a major online resource on the noted poet. His collection of poetry “Bullroarer” (Northeastern University Press, 2001) won the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award and the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

A former lecturer in the department of history and literature at Harvard, Pannapacker recently published his book “Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship” (Routledge, 2004). He is currently working on another book titled “Walt Whitman’s Cities.”

Copies of the Spring 2005 Virginia Quarterly Review featuring photographs, original poetry, literary criticism and other articles on Whitman will be available for purchase.