2024 Annual Gathering
DANA S. BRIGHAM MEMORIAL KEYNOTE Speaker: Kristen Case, author of Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2025.
Kristen Case lives and teaches in Farmington Maine. She is the author of American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (with James Finley), as well as William James and Literary Studies (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, with Kate Stanley), Thoreau in an Age of Crisis (Fink, 2021, with Henrik Otterberg and Rochelle Johnson), 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (Milkweed Editions, 2019, with Alex Manglis), and Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016, with Kevin Van Anglen). Her third poetry collection, Daphne, is forthcoming with Tupelo Press in 2025. She is the recipient of the Gatewood Prize for poetry, the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. Her book Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2025. In 2022 she co-founded the Monson Seminar, a residential course for Pell-eligible and first-generation college students, with Aaron Wyanski.
Featured Events and resources
Thoreau Society Annual Gathering – Call for Papers Due 12/1/2023.
Submit Annual Gather Paper Proposal.
2023 Honoree: Terry Tempest Williams
Watch Terry Tempest Williams‘ Thoreau Prize Address.
Learn more about the Thoreau Prize and past recipients.
Other Resources
Listen to our NEH Summer Institute Podcasts
The Thoreau Society received a Mass Humanities Staffing Recovery Grant (2023-25) in support of our Membership and Program Coordinator. Funding from Mass Humanities has been provided through the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
News + Events
The Thoreau Society is the oldest and largest organization devoted to an American author and is dedicated to promoting Thoreau’s life and works through education, outreach, and advocacy.
Established in 1941, the Thoreau Society has long contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about Thoreau by collecting books, manuscripts, and artifacts relating to Thoreau and his contemporaries, by encouraging the use of its collections, and by publishing articles in two Society periodicals. The mission of the Society is to stimulate interest in and foster education about Thoreau’s life, works, and philosophy and his place in his world and ours; to encourage research on Thoreau’s life and writings; to act as a repository for Thoreauviana and material relevant to Thoreau; and to advocate for the preservation of Thoreau Country.
Henry David Thoreau saw the exploitation of people and of nature as two sides of the same coin of injustice and oppression.
The Thoreau Society continues our namesake’s struggle to open all eyes to social and environmental injustice, and to end blindness to the consequences of unchecked racism, climate change, and other threats to individual freedom, democratic equality, and social justice in the United States and around the world. As a community devoted to Thoreau’s legacy, we are a work-in-progress, committed to the perpetual challenge of improving the Thoreau Society as an embodiment—and a promoter—of these ideals.