This year, Society members will elect ONE candidate to serve a three-year term.
This is a “working board” and nominees should have or be willing to learn specific skills. Nominees should speak to their qualifications related to one or more of the following areas in the candidate statement, and we will ask membership to consider a candidate’s abilities when voting.
We are particularly looking for nominees with skills in or who are willing to learn:
· website maintenance and membership communications
· conference and event planning
· financial/treasury management
· administering grants/awards
Talk with your Hemingway colleagues; survey the field. The nomination period will run from Thursday October 1st – Thursday October 15th. Members will be able to vote online from Thursday November 5th – 12:00 am Monday, November 30th (US Eastern Time Zone). Only members in good standing will be able to vote. To retain your membership privileges, including voting rights in Society elections, be sure that your membership has not expired. You may check your renewal date by logging on to www.hemingwaysociety.org.
You should send your nominations and questions to Sharon Hamilton (livesliterary@gmail.com), who is chairing the Nominating Committee. All members in good standing with the Society are eligible to be nominated for a position on the Board. Each candidate should be nominated by two Society Members. Be sure in your nomination to include the nominees’ contact information. To accompany the ballot, nominees will be asked to provide short, first-person written biographical narratives (approx. 250-300 words), which should speak to their qualifications in one or more of the above-mentioned areas of need. Candidate statements will be due to Sharon Hamilton by October 22nd. For examples of past candidate statements please see below.
Voting will open on Thursday November 5th, and remain open until Monday, November 30 at 12:00 am.
Here are three statement samples from previously successful candidates:
Sharon Hamilton
I am a professional writer with a Ph.D. in English who has taught classes on literature at universities in Austria, Italy, Canada, and the United States (including a class on Hemingway and Fitzgerald at Georgetown University), and a devoted Hemingway researcher. I have contributed to Hemingway scholarship through chapters in Teaching Hemingway and Modernism and in Robert K. Elder’s wonderful examination of Hemingway in Comics. Forthcoming work on Hemingway includes thoughts on his relationship with H. L. Mencken in All Hem’s Literary Friends, edited by Sean Hadley, and a chapter on “Hemingway and Canada” in the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, edited by Verna Kale.
I’m also a current member of the Hemingway Society board; during my time on the board, I have participated in media committee projects and planning, have served as a Nomination Committee Chair, and have regularly contributed to the Hemingway Review Blog. I hope that my blog articles on Hemingway and Hadley’s Chicago apartment, his early fiction in the New Orleans Double Dealer, the baseball ticket stub he took with him to war, and on the birth of his first son—along with co-authored posts on such things as an AI version of Hemingway, a visit to a bullet-hole filled bar in Wyoming once frequented by Ernest and on a stained glass window in Michigan dedicated to him by a beloved sister—have been found by the Society’s members to be informative and fun.
My experience serving as a board member has been a great pleasure. Now, I am seeking re-election.
When I was elected to the Hemingway Society board in 2021, I promised the Society’s membership that as the board’s only Canadian member I would use my tenure to highlight Hemingway’s connections to Canada. I have worked to fulfill that promise by delivering a webinar on "Hemingway in Toronto" and a presentation on Hemingway and Hadley’s 1923 Christmas in Toronto to the Society’s members. I have also written articles on Hemingway for Canada’s premier book review journal the Literary Review of Canada (examples here and here), and prepared a Hemingway Review blog on Hadley’s experiences as a new mother in Canada.
If elected for a second term, my goal is to continue to create excitement about Hemingway and his literary legacy and to promote further awareness of the Hemingway Society, especially for a new generation of Hemingway fans, including those outside the United States. To that end, I am on the planning committee for a possible 2026 Hemingway Society Conference in Toronto.
Debra Moddelmog
As a long-time member of the Hemingway Society, I welcome a formal opportunity to contribute to its continued healthy functioning and sustainability. During my career at The Ohio State University and the University of Nevada, Reno, I served in several administrative positions—chair, associate dean, and dean—that provided me with transferable experience and leadership skills for addressing some of the needs the current Board has identified. For example, I have wide-ranging experience administering grants, fellowships, and awards, which was a primary responsibility as associate dean. Additionally, for 10 years, I served on and then chaired a committee that oversaw several Hemingway Society grant programs. As a faculty member and administrator, I also organized and successfully executed workshops, seminars, and conferences, including two international conferences that drew over 300 participants each. I would gladly help with this part of the Society’s work.
The Society leadership will, of course, direct additional work of the Board, but another area in which I might contribute would be helping to grow and promote our diverse and international membership by further developing Society programs that support scholars and instructors, especially those early in their careers. As one idea, I could help set up virtual workshops about applying for grants, writing for publication, and teaching various Hemingway works and topics. I also have experience in fund-raising and might assist with securing additional resources for the Society’s funds, awards, publications, and podcast.
For over 30 years, I have been an active Hemingway scholar, even into retirement. My books include Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (translated into Japanese), the co-edited Ernest Hemingway in Context, and a new edition of The Sun Also Rises (Broadview 2024). I have published many articles and chapters on Hemingway and serve on the advisory board for the Hemingway letters project. This record has given me a strong understanding of Hemingway’s life and writings. This knowledge base, along with efforts to solicit and listen carefully to ideas and concerns of the Society’s membership, will ground my decision-making for moving the Society forward. I am honored to have been nominated and thank you for considering my candidacy.
Ross K. Tangedal
I am Associate Professor of English and Director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, where I specialize in American print & publishing culture, bibliography, textual editing, and authorship studies. I am the author of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; featuring a chapter on Hemingway) and editor of the forthcoming Good Country: Ernest Hemingway and the American West (University of Nevada Press, 2026), where I have also written an essay on “A Man of the World,” one of Hemingway’s last stories. I have published widely on Ernest Hemingway, with essays in The Hemingway Review, Teaching Hemingway and Race, Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World, The Handbook of the American Short Story, The Routledge Companion to Ernest Hemingway (forthcoming), MidAmerica, and One True Sentence, and I’ve been interviewed on One True Podcast twice and participated as a panelist during the “Dangerous Summer” webinar series. I have been a member of the Hemingway Society since 2012. My other books include the edited collections The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Routledge 2026), Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan State University Press, 2023), and Editing the Harlem Renaissance (Clemson University Press, 2021).
I have been a member of the core editorial team of the Hemingway Letters Project since 2020, where I am now an associate volume editor (my first credit being volume 6, released by Cambridge University Press, 2024). I had the privilege to serve as assistant program coordinator of the 19th Biennial Hemingway Society Conference in Wyoming and Montana (my home state) in July 2022, where I was responsible for program logistics, panel organization, and on-site troubleshooting with site coordinators. I am a two-time recipient of the Lewis-Reynolds-Smith Founders Fellowship (and currently serve on the selection committee), a JFK Library Hemingway Grant recipient, and the bibliographer for The Hemingway Review. I have presented at Hemingway conferences in Petoskey, Oak Park, and Sheridan/Cooke City, as well as at multiple meetings of the American Literature Association.
My experience in event programming, video conferencing, conference planning, financial management, membership communications, and grants/awards will hopefully assist the society as it continues to grow into the future. My favorite Hemingway novel is The Sun Also Rises, and picking a favorite short story is next to impossible: the Nick Adams stories remain close to me, as does “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” I live in central Wisconsin with my wife, CJ, and our three kids: Adeline, Hazel, and Charlie.