WKU News

Joan Romano Shifflett, winner of 2020 Warren-Brooks Award for her book Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry, will give a lecture at the annual meeting of the Robert Penn Warren Circle. The virtual lecture will take place on Friday, April 23^rd, at 12:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry, was selected as the 2020 winner of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for outstanding literary scholarship and criticism. The book award selection committee was impressed with Shifflett’s contribution to our understanding of close reading, a methodology that Brooks and Warren advocated through critical texts like Understanding Poetry (1938). In Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell, Shifflett examines the artistic and personal connections between Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. By tracing their parallel literary development, Shifflett offers a compelling new perspective on the evolution of twentieth-­century American poetry.

Dr. Joan Romano Shifflett is Writing Center Director & Instructor at the United States Naval Academy, where she teaches in the English Department and Junior UK International Scholars program. She completed her Ph.D. (2013) in English language and literature at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Her research interests include twentieth-century American poetry, the American novel, literature of the American South, literary modernism, and rhetoric & composition.

The Warren-Brooks Award, presented each year by the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University, was established by the Warren family to honor an outstanding work of literary scholarship that embodies the spirit, scope, and integrity of the work produced by Warren and his frequent collaborator, Brooks. 

For more information, or to receive a Zoom to attend the lecture, please contact Marla Zubel, rpw.center@wku.edu