William Gay first came to the conference in 1999 as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. Later that year, Gay published his first novel, The Long Home, which received the James A. Michener Memorial Prize. Gay returned to Sewanee in 2000 as a Walter A. Dakin Fellow and served as the Tennessee Williams Fellow for the 2000-2001 academic year.
When she received a Walter E. Dakin fellowship in 1999 and subsequently served as the Tennessee Williams Fellow at the University of the South in 2000, Claire Messud had already published two critically acclaimed novels, When the World Was Steady, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Last Life, which was translated into seven languages and won Britain’s Encore Award.
Tony Earley first came to Sewanee in 1995 as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction after the publication of his story collection, Here We Are in Paradise. He returned to the conference the following year as a staff member and then served as writer-in-residence at the University of the South in 1997.