O'Connor Institute

The O'Connor Institute is kicking off the Inaugural Southern Gothic Lectures Series! Join us for this interdisciplinary series of discussions among the fields of literature, environmental studies and southern studies.Sara L. Crosby hails from an island off the coast of Louisiana. She's a professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion where she teaches classes on everything from early American literature to pop culture to environmental writing. She has authored two monographs...

Join us on Thursday, Jan. 23, for the Flannery O’Connor Book Club! We'll discuss Brad Gooch’s widely acclaimed biography of O’Connor, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (2009). Read the Prologue and Chapters 1-3. We'll meet at 2 p.m. in person in Eatonton, Georgia, at the Writer’s Museum and on Zoom at 7 p.m. Register for the Zoom link at https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/00f8af20502641f88fb3c9d52b9551c5.

Join us to discuss Dear Regina by Monica Miller. Miller has collected O’Connor’s letters home during her years in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of Iowa. (2 p.m. in person in Eatonton, Georgia, at the Writer’s Museum; on Zoom at 7 p.m.)

Join us for a Zoom talk by interim executive director Dr. Katie Simon discussing the connections between race and mobility in one of Flannery O'Connor's most famous stories. Register at https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/3d95cc87c521473bb0fe9bd787c0b3e0.

In honor of National Picture Book Month, the Flannery O'Connor Book Club will read and discuss two picture books based on O’Connor’s life: Acree Graham Macam and Natalie Nelson’s "The King of the Birds" and Amy Alznauer’s "The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor." (2 p.m. in person in Eatonton, Georgia, at the Writer’s Museum; on Zoom at 7 p.m.) No prior reading is required and all are welcome to attend. https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/555c52ae10c34e6c821705b03ab90a9c  

Did you know “The King of the Birds” by Acree Graham Macam and Natalie Nelson, “The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor” by Amy Alznauer and illustrated by Ping Zhu, and Mary Carpenter’s middle grades book “Flannery O’Connor: A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind” are the texts studied in the Writing for Success curriculum? Join us Tuesday, Nov. 12 at  2 p.m. for a special info session on how these books bring a local author to life in the Flannery O’Connor and Storytelling unit of study for...

This talk by scholar-in-residence, Dr. Farrell O'Gorman, will detail how Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), one of the most acclaimed American novelists of the last 50 years, is inextricably linked to Flannery O’Connor. He repeatedly praised her in the early years of his career–most substantially in his correspondence with Robert Coles, an influential Harvard child psychiatrist who wrote extensively on O’Connor while also acting as a patron to McCarthy. In his fiction, McCarthy, like O’Connor,...