Please join Whitman Initiative president Karen Karbiener for a conversation with Dr. Paul Salveson of Bolton, England. Paul is the perfect person to outline the story of Bolton’s strong Whitman links, starting with a meeting of friends in the 1880s and continuing through the ‘Whitman Revival’ of the 1980s to 2022, when the annual Whitman Walk will take place during the first-ever Bolton Whitman Weekend (May 28-29). Bolton was at the heart of the Lancashire cotton industry and its role as a gritty industrial centre – surrounded by fine moorland scenery – probably appealed to Whitman! The contacts developed up to and long after his death, with close friendships formed between Whitman’s friends (notably the Traubels) and the Bolton group. Today, those links are as strong as ever, supported by the Bolton Library Service, the University of Bolton and the Bolton Socialist Club.
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With Paul Salveson and Walt Whitman in Bolton
April 14, 2022 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Paul Salveson is a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Huddersfield and Bolton. His Bolton role is ‘Visiting Professor in Worktown Studies’ in the Faculty of Arts whilst his Huddersfield position is in Transport and Logistics. He runs his own publishing business Lancashire Loominary (www.lancashireloominary.co.uk) which specialises in Lancashire working class history and culture. He initiated the revived ‘Walt Whitman Walk’ in Bolton in the mid-1980s. Paul’s PhD is entitled ‘Region, Class, Culture: Lancashire Dialect Literature 1746-1935’ (Salford 1993). It explores working class history and culture through the work of Lancashire’s dialect writers some of whom were admirers of Whitman. Publications include With Walt Whitman in Bolton – Lancashire’s links to Walt Whitman and Moorlands, Memories and Reflections which features the Bolton Whitman connections. His first novel, ‘The Works’, was published in 2020.
Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman (most recently working with Brian Selznick on Live Oak, with Moss, a new illustrated edition of Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems). 2022 will be her second year participating in the annual Whitman Walk in Bolton, where she first met her dear friend Paul in 2008; this year, she is delighted to work with Paul, Chris Chilton, Karin Coonrod, Kim Edwards-Keates, and others on the first Bolton “Whitman Weekend” around their signature event.