Reading Willa Cather: A Lecture With Dramatic Readings

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is pleased to welcome Peter Cipkowski, Linda Bisesti and Matthew Reidy for a compelling blend of literary lecture and dramatic performance in this sesquicentennial celebration of Willa Cather (1873–1947), one of the most distinctive and enduring voices in 20th-century American literature.

A peer of Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, Cather charted her own path through determination, struggle, and artistic vision. Her groundbreaking novels — including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, One of Ours, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop — helped shape the American canon.This program explores Cather’s turbulent life, her uniquely American voice, and her continued relevance today — interwoven with dramatic readings from her fiction and letters, performed by Los Angeles-based actors Linda Bisesti and Matthew Reidy.

Peter Cipkowski, Ed.D., is a literary and political historian at UCLA and serves as Vice President of the Board of Governors of the National Willa Cather Center. He has led programs across the country commemorating the sesquicentennial of Willa Cather’s birth,…