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.
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.
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.
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.