Please join us on November 16th at 11AM EST to discuss Maria Farland's new book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agriculture, and the Rural Modern in US Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), which was shortlisted for the MSA's First Book Prize. Maria will be joining us for the second half of the conversation.

We will be focusing on the book's Introduction as well as Chapter Five on the Harlem Renaissance. We will pair this reading with short poems by Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer. Of course, feel free to read other chapters of Farland's book as well, and/or bring other primary sources to the conversation. As always, we encourage you to join us no matter how much you've managed to read.

We will circulate a Zoom link on the SIG and MSA listservs in the days before the meeting. Follow this link to join the SIG listserv.