All Alumni
Erin Belieu
A Walter E. Dakin Fellow in 1997, Erin Belieu's first book of poems, Infanta, was selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series and published by Copper Canyon Press in 1995. It was and was named one of the ten best books of 1995 by Library Journal, Washington Post Book World, and the National Book Critics' Circle. She has published two other collections, Black Box, winner of the Ohioana Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award, and One Above and One Below, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She co-edited the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women. She teaches at Florida State University and is the co-founder and co-director of VIDA: Women In Literary Arts.
Judy Budnitz
Judy Budnitz was a John N. Wall Fellow in Fiction in 1999, having published a collection of stories, Flying Leap, which was a New York Times Notable book in 1998. Her novel, If I Told You Once, won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, and she is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. In 2006, Budnitz published a second collection of stories, Nice Big American Baby and the following year was selected as one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta.
Camille Dungy
Camille Dungy was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Poetry in 2001. In 2006, she published her first collection, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her most recent collection is Suck on the Marrow. She is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and coeditor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her poems have appeared in Missouri Review, Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, and many other publications. Dungy is currently Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
Tony Earley
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. His writing soon won him recognition from both Granta in 1997 and the New Yorker in 1999 as one of America’s best young fiction writers. His first novel, Jim the Boy, appeared in 2000 and was a bestseller. His second novel, The Blue Star, a sequel to Jim the Boy, was published in 2008. He has returned several times to the conference as a faculty member in fiction and will be one of eight fiction faculty members for the 2010 session.
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.
Beth Ann Fennelly
Beth Ann Fennelly first came to Sewanee in 1999 as a Tennessee Williams Scholar in poetry. Her first collection of poems, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was a BookSense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her next book, Tender Hooks, was published in 2004 by W. W. Norton, the same year that she returned to the conference, this time as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow. Since then, her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2005 and 2006, Oxford American, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and Chattahoochee Review. W. W. Norton also published her two most recent books, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother and Unmentionables. She is now an Associate Professor at The University of Mississippi.
William Gay
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. Gay then published another novel, Provinces of Night, and a collection of stories, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, which contained stories that had been published in the Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Oxford American, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. His stories have also been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, Best New American Voices, and Best American Mystery Stories. In 2006, he published his third novel, Twilight, and was named a USA Ford Foundation Fellow by United States Artists. In 2010, MacAdam/Cage will publish his new novel, The Lost Country.
Lorraine M. López
Lorraine M. López received a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction in 2002 on the strength of her collection of stories, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories (Curbstone Press, 2002), which won the Miguel Marmol Prize for Fiction. She has since published a young adult novel, Call Me Henrí (Curbstone Press, 2006), a novel, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters (Grand Central/Hachette Books, 2008), and, most recently, a collection of stories, Homicide Survivors Picnic (BkMk Press, 2009). Homicide Survivors Picnic was a finalist for the 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. She has edited a collection of essays, An Angle of Vision: Women Writers and Their Poor and Working-Class Roots (University of Michigan Press, 2009) and serves as an associate editor of the Afro-Hispanic Review. She is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University.
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.
Claire Messud
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. Since then, she has published a collection of two novellas, The Hunters, which was also a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and the best-selling novel, The Emporer’s Children, which is currently being adapted into a film for Universal Pictures. She has returned to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on several occasions to serve as a faculty member in fiction, most recently in 2007.
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.
Benjamin Percy
A Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction in 2003, Benjamin Percy has since published two collections of stories, The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh, and a novel, The Wilding. Another novel, Red Moon, is forthcoming in 2012. He has won a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, and his stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Paris Review, Esquire, and many other journals and magazines. He is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at Iowa State University and a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.