Westminster English Professor Signs Book Deal

Dr. James A . Perkins, professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Public Relations at Westminster College, has signed with the Louisiana State University Press to co-edit The Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, volumes three, four and five.

Perkins will work with Dr. Randy Hendricks of the University of West Georgia and Dr. William Bedford Clark of Texas A & M University.  Clark edited the first two volumes in a series that covered 1924-1942.

"Bedford has set a high standard for Randy and me.  Fortunately, he will stay on the team as a senior editor," said Perkins.  "We are fortunate that recently Tommie Lou Frey, Warren's niece, gave us 114 pages of family correspondence.  With that addition we will be able to present a representative selection of Warren's correspondence over the years."

Volume three will contain letters from 1943-1956, which cover the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men and its conversion into an Academy Award-winning movie.  Volume four will contain letters from 1957-1973, and volume five will contain letters from 1974 until Warren's death in 1989.

Perkins has worked on Warren before.  He and James A. Grimshaw, Jr. published Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: Three Stage Versions with the University of Georgia Press in 2000, and currently has a book titled, Robert Penn Warren and the Cass Mastern Matterial, at the LSU press.  Perkins, along with Dr. Patrick McCarthy, professor of biology at Westminster, and Frank D. Allen, Jr., a Washington attorney, has an article in the winter issue of the Mississippi Quarterly that uses genetic evidence to determine paternity of Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King's Men.

Perkins, who has been with Westminster since 1973, earned his undergraduate degree from Centre College, his master's from Miami University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee.  During the fall term of 1998, he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Seoul National University in Korea.  He has also been honored as a Henderson Lecturer and McCandless Fellow.  His publications include three chapbooks of poetry, For the Record: A Rober Drake Reader (a collection edited with Randy Hendricks), and collections of short stories, and Southern Writers at Centuries End, (a collection of essays co-edited with Jeffrey Folks).

 For more information, contact Perkins at (724) 946-7347 or e-mail jperkins@westminster.edu.