Lehigh Valley English professor receives award for book about Edgar Allan Poe

CENTER VALLEY, Pa. -- Barbara Cantalupo received the 2014 Quinn Award from the Poe Studies Association (PSA) for her monograph, “Poe and the Visual Arts” (Penn State University Press, 2014). Cantalupo is a professor of English at Penn State Lehigh Valley and is the founding editor of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. The PSA Awards and Executive committees made the unanimous recommendation to give the 2014 award to Cantalupo in August. She will be presented with the award at the January 2016 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Austin, Texas.

The Patrick F. Quinn Award was established in 1999 by a memorial contribution in honor of the late Poe scholar, Patrick F. Quinn, initiated by a gift from Shirley Quinn and supplemented by family and friends. The first winner of the Quinn Award was nominated and selected by the Executive Committee and announced at a Poe panel at the 2000 MLA Convention. Cantalupo, of Bethlehem, is only the fifth person to receive the Quinn Award.

The PSA was founded in 1972 as a scholarly organization. Its primary goal is the exchange of ideas regarding the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Membership in the PSA is open to persons interested in this goal, and, at present, the organization has more than 300 members from the United States, Canada, Asia, South America, and most countries in Europe, including Russia.

As a voluntary, nonprofit educational organization, the PSA supports the community of scholars interested in Poe, sponsors international Poe conferences, organizes panels about Poe and his work at the MLA and American Literature Association (ALA) conventions, and disseminates information on Poe-related cultural and news events.