Saturday, May 06, 2006

VLA Board member pens new title

Dan Guillory, a longtime member of the Vachel Lindsay Association Board of Directors as well as an author and historian, has produced a new volume of Images of America entitled Wartime Decatur 1832-1945.

Dan examines the town's wartime experiences from the Black Hawk War to World War Two. These experiences include the founding of the Grand Army of the Republic and the tradition of the Decatur Canteen. Dan discovered a cache of photographs and documents from World War One locked away in a library while researching the book, providing an excellent resource for his work.

Dan was a professor of English for 37 years, earning his Ph.D. at Tulane University in 1972. He is presently Professor Emeritus of English at Millikin University in Decatur.

Dan's other titles include Decatur (Images of America: Illinois), Living With Lincoln: Life and Art in the Heartland, When the Waters Recede: Rescue and Recovery During the Great Flood, and The Alligator Inventions.

The VLA is lucky to have such a talent on the Board.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Navigating the Maze

The Vachel Lindsay Association has been a proud co-sponsor of the Poets and Writers Literary Forum's annual anthology of poetry by young people, Navigating the Maze, for the past couple of years. We're really impressed by the quality of the work by the contributors.

Local Lindsay interpreter Job Conger, who served as the first president of the P&WLF, blogs here on the recent reading from this year's edition at the Hoogland Center in Springfield.