B. H. Fairchild
In 1992, the third year of the conference, B. H. Fairchild came to Sewanee as a Walter E. Dakin fellow on the strength of his poetry collection Local Knowledge. While at Sewanee, he worked with Anthony Hecht, who would write the introduction for Fairchild’s next collection, The Art of the Lathe, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award. He has published four more collections of poetry, including Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, which received the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, Fairchild received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, which is administered by The Sewanee Review to recognize distinguished American poet for the work of a career.
Stewart O’Nan
Stewart O'Nan was awarded a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction in 1995, having published a collection of stories, In the Walled City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), and a novel, Snow Angels (Doubleday, 1994). The following year, he was selected by Granta as one of America's Best Young Novelists, and he published another novel, The Names of the Dead (Doubleday, 1996). He has since published ten more novels, including A Prayer for the Dying (Henry Holt, 1999), The Night Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), and Last Night at the Lobster (Viking, 2007). He has also written two books of nonfiction, The Circus Fire (Doubleday, 2000) and Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season (with Stephen King) (Scribner, 2004). He returned to Sewanee in 2001 as a visitor. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
Cate Marvin
Cate Marvin was a 1998 Tennessee Williams Scholar in Poetry. Her first collection of poems, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001), was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Marvin returned to Sewanee in 2002 as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow, the same year she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006) and her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande in 2007. A Whiting Award recipient and 2007 NYFA Gregory Millard Fellow, she teaches poetry writing in Lesley University's Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the co-founder and co-director of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.