Dear Colleagues,

The turnout for our Business Meeting at Anna Maria’s in Washington, D.C. was truly gratifying. We had about thirty people, some of them ready to register as members on the spot. It was of course lovely to reconnect with the many WIF fidèles in attendance as well.

The two WIF sessions at MLA featured fascinating papers that spanned the centuries and the regions of the francophone world. Thanks to Catherine Poisson and Florence Ramond Jurney who organized such interesting sessions and to all of our presenters. We now need to convince the MLA program committee that such strong panels should be scheduled in more mainstream time slots that do not conflict with those of our sister organizations! The following sessions were selected by vote for the 2006 MLA, rescheduled for Philadelphia as a result of Hurricane Katrina: “Le polar au féminin : question de genre,” proposed by Annik Doquire Kerszberg, and “Célibataires ou Célibattantes,” proposed by Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood.

The votes for both these MLA sessions and the 2005 slate of candidates were extremely close, and I thank everyone who proposed a session or ran for office. Congratulations to Cecilia Beach and Margot Irvine who were elected to the executive committee as regional representatives for New York State and New England and Eastern Canada, respectively. I am especially delighted to announce that Julie Nack Ngue, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles has been elected our first graduate student representative. Her election to the executive committee marks an important juncture for an organization that values so highly the inclusion of graduate students.

Congratulations also go to Andrea King of Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, winner of the graduate essay prize for her essay “Anorexie, prostitution, et psychanalyse dans Putain de Nelly Arcan.” Her advisor, WIF member Agnès Coacher, is the recipient of the Outstanding Mentor Award. There was no undergraduate prize awarded this year due to a lack of submissions. Members are encouraged to nominate their students for this award!

2006 promises to be just as rich a year for WIF. Juliette Rogers and the program committee have worked hard to construct a multi-faceted conference for April 6-9 at the University of New Hampshire. The conference fittingly focuses on North American francophone writers, including those from Québec, Acadia, and New England, and also on the broad theme of “women and work.” Plenary speakers include Claire Quintal, Professor Emerita at Assumption College and a leading specialist on Franco-American literature and civilization, Geraldine Sheridan of the University of Limerick who will speak on “Images of Women at Work: 18th-century France,” and Québécois writer Louise Dupré. La Donna Musicale will perform works in French from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the closing banquet will feature a roundtable discussion and performance on Franco-American Arts in New England.

Two volumes of WIF Studies are planned for 2006: one regular volume and one special volume, French/Francophone Culture and Literature Through Film, from WIF Studies Executive Editor Catherine R. Montfort and her co-editor Michele Bissière. Dawn Cornelio continues to serve as Production Editor, and Miléna Santoro as Book Review Editor of the Studies.

You will find the 2004 and 2005 Treasurer’s reports from Christine Lac in this Newsletter. It’s obvious that WIF’s finances are healthy thanks to your membership; individual gifts from Janis Pallister and Françoise Lionnet are also enormously appreciated. Please note that the current figures do not include expenses for the special volume of essays from the 2004 conference entitled Écriture Courante: Critical Perspectives on French and Francophone Women in Honor of Annabelle Rea. My wonderful co-editor, Cathy Yandell, and I were disappointed that problems at the printer kept the volume from you for so long, but we trust that you can now enjoy it.

After five years as treasurer, Christine has decided that it is time to take a well-deserved break. Likewise Adrianna Paliyenko, who served as Managing Editor of WIF Studies since 1998, has also passed the torch on to Dorothy Stegman as we continue to reconfigure the way we publish and mail the Studies. WIF is extraordinarily grateful to both Christine and Adrianna for their many years of service.

Marie-Christine Koop has generously offered to host the 2008 WIF conference at her home institution, the University of North Texas. She’ll be ably assisted by her colleagues, WIF members Jerry Nash and Marijn Kaplan.

WIF Studies, the Newsletter, and our conferences are only some of the services WIF provides its membership. The WIF listserve and web site, managed so well by Gay Rawson and Nancy Virtue respectively, provide important information about our organization’s activities and other, related announcements. Benefits of enrollment also include the online Directory, compiled by Roseanna Dufault and Karen Woodward, which provide access to a network of nearly 400 members' professional affiliations, addresses and areas of specialization. A new resource that should be available within the next year to members online, thanks to the initiative of Christiane Makward, is an electronic collection of the bibliographies that have appeared in the Newsletter. More on this valuable resource as the project comes to fruition.

WIF is justifiably proud of the benefits of WIF membership and the accomplishments of our members. Moreover, we continue to grow and evolve and I’d love to see this trend continue through further efforts to recruit members. If you know of colleagues, new members of the profession, or graduate students who would gain from all that WIF has to offer, please encourage them to join!

Wishing you all the best in 2006,

Mary