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On May 25, the University of Maryland at College Park Libraries and the University of Virginia Press sponsored a reception and book signing in The Katherine Anne Porter Room in McKeldin Library in honor of the publication of Texas A & M professor Janis Stout's intellectual biography, Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times, published by the University of Virginia Press. Stout's book has been described as the first intellectual biography of Porter, a careful and compelling study that effectively places Porter in the context of her time. Stout is also the author of Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion; The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures; Sodoms in Eden: The City in American Fiction before 1860; and three works of fiction: Home Truth, Eighteen Holes, and A Family Likeness.

Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the University of Maryland at College Park Libraries, chaired the 1995 Katherine Anne Porter session at the American Literature Association convention held at the Stouffer Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, May 26-28. The title of the KAP session was "Katherine Anne Porter in Context." The papers delivered were the following: Charlotte Beck (Maryville College), "'Grasshopper and Ant': The Complementary Careers of Katherine Anne Porter and Caroline Gordon"; Thomas Austenfeld (Drury College), "Porter's Totalitarianism Revisited"; and Jeanette McVicker (SUNY, Fredonia), "Katherine Anne Porter, the New Criticism, and the 'New' Modernism."

After the session and the KAP Society's business meeting, the University of Maryland at College Park Libraries hosted a reception honoring the society and its guests.