Visitors are welcomed to tour the Eudora Welty House and Garden on second Saturday mornings of each month, as greeted in the feature photograph by Maggie Stevenson, Special Projects Coordinator. Tours are offered at 9 and 11 a.m. Reservations may be made by calling 601-353-7762 or on line at tours@eudoraweltyhouse.com.
Three special programs were held on the Second Saturdays in April, May, and June to celebrate the new weekend openings. Isabel Gray, below left, Education Outreach Specialist for the Welty House and Garden, welcomed visitors to the first Second Saturday.
Patti Carr Black, second from left above, was the April featured speaker, seen here with, from left, Welty House Director Bridget Edwards, Welty Foundation board member Carla Wall, and friend Modena Martin. Black, former Director of the Museum Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and long-time friend of Eudora’s, presented a talk on her 1995 photographic exhibit “Other Places,” showing during 2016 in the Welty Education and Visitors Center.
May’s guest speaker was Welty Historic Garden Consultant Susan Haltom, below, author with Jane Roy Brown of One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place. Haltom led tours of the Welty Garden, shown here in its Spring splendor.
Suzanne Marrs, Welty biographer and Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, was the featured speaker in June. She presented a program, shown below, on Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and interesting history about the Pulitzer Prize. She also led tours of the Welty House, focusing on artifacts in the House and the Education and Visitors Center related to The Optimist’s Daughter, for which Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973.