Editing the Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky Correspondence: A Panel Discussion with Jenny Penberthy, Barry Ahearn, and Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

The Friends of Lorine Niedecker are pleased to host a very special panel discussion focused on the surviving correspondence between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky. The event will take place on Zoom and will be recorded.

In 1993, Jenny Penberthy published Niedecker and the correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970 with the Cambridge University Press. This volume contained an extensive introduction contextualizing the Niedecker/Zukofsky relationship and made significant portions of most of Niedecker’s surviving letters to Zukofsky available to other scholars and researchers.

While fragments from dozens of Zukofsky’s letters to Niedecker survived and were held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the Zukofsky’s son Paul denied permission for these letters to be published for many years. In 2013, Barry Ahearn published The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, but noted in that volume’s introduction that “The letters to Lorine Niedecker are also omitted from this selection, in keeping with the wishes of Paul Zukofsky”. Following Paul Zukofsky’s death in 2017, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas became the Zukofsky’s literary executor, and has since loosened many of the previous restrictions on publishing Zukofsky-related material.

Earlier this year, Barry Ahearn and Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas published on Z-Site a revised and much expanded (digital) edition of The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky. This publication included, for the first time, what survives of the letters Zukofsky wrote to Niedecker, allowing readers and scholars to gain a fuller and more accurate understanding of the two poets’ relationship.

In light of this important development, the Friends of Lorine Niedecker are especially excited to host a panel conversation with each of the three scholar-editors of the published Niedecker/Zukofsky correspondence: Jenny Penberthy, Barry Ahearn, and Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas. The event will be hosted by FoLN board member Steel Wagstaff and will feature brief remarks from each panelist followed by a moderated conversation.

Please join us on December 12 for an exciting glimpse into the rich, intensive, decades-spanning correspondence between the poets Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky.

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To learn more about each of our distinguished panelists:

• Read Jenny Penberthy’s faculty biography at Capilano University.
• Read Barry Ahearn faculty biography at Tulane University.
• Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas is the editor of Z-Site, the outstanding digital companion to the works of Louis Zukofsky. He co-edited, with Mark Scroggins, The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky, published in 2025 by the University of New Mexico Press. He received his doctorate from Duke University in 1987 and taught subsequently in universities in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. He currently lives in Bellinzona, Switzerland, primarily working on modernist American poetry and occasionally translating contemporary Chinese poetry.