LITTLE LECTURES 2025

Current Voices in Appalachian Literature

Four lectures in our classic format bring the audience up to speed on some of the latest and greatest in West Virginia and regional fiction and poetry! This year’s program is made possible in part by generous funding from the Herscher Foundation.

Little Lectures are informal programs featuring speakers on a variety of topics.

In-person programs are presented on Sunday afternoons at 2:00 p.m. at our headquarters located at 1310 Kanawha Boulevard, East, Charleston, in the parlor of MacFarland-Hubbard House. The series is one of the many ways the Humanities Council shares our historic property with the community. Seating is limited (thus “Little” Lectures) and reservations are suggested. Admission is $10 per person and includes refreshments after the lecture. When the weather is nice refreshments are enjoyed outdoors under our pergola.

The Little Lectures are presented once each month. Previous Little Lecturers include historian John Alexander Williams, biographer Jean Edward Smith, Monticello horticulturalist Peter Hatch, novelist Denise Giardina, playwright Billy Edd Wheeler, and West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman.

Call 304.346.8500 or email warmack@wvhumanities.org for further information.

All public spaces at the MacFarland-Hubbard House are accessible. When making your reservations, please advise us of any accessibility accommodations that you may need. Contact 304.346.8500 in advance.

From 2020 onward, videos of all West Virginia Humanities Council Little Lectures are available on YouTube and Facebook. 

2025 Lecture Schedule

MARCH 30 - Eric Waggoner

The View from Here: A Survey of West Virginia Literature in 2025

American literature began as “regional writing.” Throughout a complex history spanning over 400 years, American imaginative writing has never lost its attentiveness to local landscapes, conditions, and perspectives. In this lecture, Dr. Eric Waggoner discusses American literature’s regionalist beginnings, the unique emergence of West Virginia literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and our present cultural moment, when the literature of the Mountain State is more attuned than ever to national and global concerns. Eric Waggoner holds a Ph.D. in English from Arizona State University. His scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Hemingway Review, The Journal of Auto/Biographical Studies, and Appalachian Journal, and books including American Literature in Transition, 1970-1980 (Cambridge University Press), and Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West (University of Utah Press).

APRIL 27 - An Afternoon with Novelist M. GLENN TAYLOR

Huntington native M. Glenn Taylor’s four novels have made waves with both audiences and critics across America. Hear about how the author’s West Virginia life has informed genre-spanning works brimming with humor and historical texture. Currently teaching and writing from Morgantown, Taylor’s books include The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (2008); The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010); A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (2015); and The Songs of Betty Baach, which won the 2023 Juniper Prize in Fiction.

MAY 18 - An Afternoon with Novelist MESHA MAREN

Author Mesha Maren frequently mines her Greenbrier County upbringing across three novels (and counting): Sugar Run (2013), Perpetual West (2022), and Shae (2023). A writer whose “sentences shimmer with precision, elegance, and grit,” Maren is currently an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. The author will share selections from her books and discuss Appalachia’s place in contemporary literature.

JUNE 22 - An Afternoon with Poet DOUG VAN GUNDY

Poet, musician, and Elkins native Doug Van Gundy has been featured on Mountain Stage and served as a visiting poet across Appalachia. This celebrated raconteur will guide the audience through some of the brightest new voices in West Virginia poetry, along with a selection of his own recent work. Van Gundy directs the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Poets & Writers, Poetry, and the Oxford American. He is the author of a book of poems, A Life Above Water, and coeditor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia.

2024 Lecture Videos

You can watch all past lectures from 2020 onward on YouTube. Here is last year's selection!