Stanley and Joan Elkin Celebration

On Monday, April 21, 2025, the WashU Libraries, with support from the English Department, hosted the Stanley and Joan Elkin Celebration. The celebration featured three distinguished speakers who knew Stanley and Joan Elkin as friends, colleagues, students, or all of the above. The program was available in person or remotely via Zoom.

Associate University Librarian Nadia Ghasedi welcomed the audience. She acknowledged the support of Molly Elkin and Ivan Wasserman, as well as the English Department, and mentioned artist Tim Youd’s “Up All Night” performance art project, a key part of the Elkin Celebration.

Ghasedi encouraged the audience to visit the current exhibition, Stanley and Joan Elkin’s Artistic Kingdom, on display in Olin Library until July 13, 2025, with a digital version available online as well.

Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and English Department Chair Abram Van Engen spoke next. He talked about the privilege of holding the endowed Elkin chair and read an amusing passage from Elkin’s 1979 triptych, The Living End. He then introduced the three speakers.

Novelist, memoirist, and editor Benjamin Taylor focused his remarks on his time on the WashU English faculty, from 1984 to 1998, when he got to know the Elkins very well. Taylor declared that one thing everyone in the amazing generation of American fiction writers born in the 1920s and 30s could agree on was Stanley’s excellence and immense originality. Taylor relayed memories of Stanley’s dark humor and Joan’s optimistic determination, right up to the very end, when Stanley died in May 1995.

Jan Garden Castro gave a presentation centered on Joan’s artwork. Castro, who holds two Master of Arts degrees from WashU, showed selections of Joan’s art and commented on the rich themes to be found in them and the essential role she and her family played in Stanley’s life and literary art. You can read Jan’s remarks and view the accompanying images here.

The last speaker was Adam Ross, whose Playworld novel was just published to great acclaim in January, and who was an MFA student in the Writing Program in the early 1990s. He related how he decided to come to WashU instead of elsewhere to study under Elkin, and he immersed the audience in the intense and intimidating experience of being a young writer in one of Elkin’s workshops. But he credited Elkin with his later success not only as a fiction writer but as a literary editor as well.

Ross concluded with a memory of visiting the Elkin home for one of his individual tutorials with Stanley. Joan was there too, and they were surrounded by all the people in her artwork; both she and her subjects left a strong impression on Ross, just as Stanley did with his writing advice that day. As Taylor and Castro did before him, Ross brought both Stanley and Joan back together for us as an inseparable couple in both life and art.

Following the program, the audience was invited to share their own memories of Stanley and Joan, and then to enjoy the exhibition and reception.

Photos from the Stanley and Joan Elkin Celebration