Louisa May Alcott Society

At the Louisa May Alcott Society's annual business meeting in Boston this year,  Max   L.   Chapnick  was awarded the Beverly Lyon Clark Article Prize  for his essay, "Duty and Ambition in Louisa May Alcott Poems, Old and New."  Committee members had this to say about the essay: Chapnick's article "makes significant new contributions ... by attending to Alcott’s poetry, which is understudied, attributing previously unattributed poems to Alcott and offering a compelling discussion of their significance.   Max ’s discussion asserts that these poems (and his discussion of them) contributes to the case for the other previously unattributed stories he has identified. I admire the readings he offers of the individual poems. He both situates them within the broader context of 19th century poetry by women and within Alcott’s body of work, offering an elegant argument for how these poems contribute to our understanding of the tension between duty and ambit...

The Alcott Society is offering up to three travel grants of $400 each to support students and non-tenure-track members of the Society to attend present on Alcott at an academic conference in the 2025 calendar year.  These grants, supported financially by the Alcott Society and its members and donors, are meant to encourage Alcott scholarship and to honor the career and memory of Sarah Elbert, a literary historian whose important research charted exciting new paths for Alcott scholarship. Applying is easy. Please just send the abstract for your paper, information about its acceptance and conference venue, and a one-page vita to Marlowe Daly-Galeano at hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu. We encourage students and NTT members of the Society to see these travel grants as a possible source for financial support for sharing their Alcott research with a larger audience.

The following Emerson Society CFP may be of interest to some of our members.  Ralph Waldo Emerson Society  Emersonian Revolutions Today   Thoreau Annual Gathering,  July 9 – 13, 2025    Bronson Alcott in 1871 wrote that “He helps us most who helps us to answer our own questions. [Emerson] gets us to do our own work, does not do it for us. He does his work well, for he never produces any finished piece of work. That is his great excellence.”  As well, Theodore Parker notes that “Emerson belongs to the exceptional literature of the times – and while his culture joins him to the history of man, his ideas and whole life enable him to represent also the nature of man, and so the write for the future.” We might say that for Emerson, revolution was an ongoing process, a particular way of seeing the world. How and where do we see Emerson’s revolutionary processes in the world today? Papers might consider Emerson’s work in social and political reform (women’s r...