History
In 1983 Tennessee Williams, American playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, left the residual portion of his estate to Sewanee as a memorial to his grandfather, the Reverend Walter E. Dakin, who had studied at the University of the South’s School of Theology in 1895. Mr. Williams directed in his will that a fund be established to encourage “creative writing.” This fund supports the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a growing number of residencies during which writers have both conducted workshops in the college and pursued their own writing. These include Mark Richard, Elizabeth Dewberry, Tony Earley, Ann Patchett, Roberta Allen, Ron Fitzgerald, Daniel Anderson, A. Manette Ansay, Lisa Shea, Jessica Goldberg, Josip Novakovich, Claire Messud, Stephanie Fleischmann, William Gay, Thomas Moran, Daisy Foote, Richard Schmitt, Elwood Reid, Dan O’Brien, Tom Franklin, Leah Stewart, Hilary Bell, Kent Nelson, Arlene Hutton, Joe Osterhaus, Ellen Slezak, Dominic Taylor, Andy Bragen, and Thomas Lakeman.
The Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund has made possible two other undertakings. The Sewanee Writers’ Series (1998–2004) published novels, plays, and collections of poetry or short stories by John Bricuth, Philip Stephens, Greg Williamson, Charles Martin, Andrew Hudgins, Daniel Mueller, Adrianne Harun, Lily Tuck, Richard Schmitt, Brent Benoit, Greg Williams, and Horton Foote. In 1998, the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center opened in Sewanee. This adaptable 150-seat theater further memorializes Mr. Williams’s art and testifies to his vision for writers.
The Sewanee Young Writers' Conference moves into its seventeenth season in 2010. This program is geared toward high-school writers. Send inquiries to director Elizabeth Grammer at 735 University Avenue, Sewanee TN 37383-1000.
The Sewanee School of Letters, a low-residency program offering the MA in English and American literature and the MFA in creative writing, enters its fifth session this summer. Faculty will include Ann Jennalie Cook, John Ernest, John Gatta, John Grammer (director), Andrew Hudgins, Holly Goddard Jones, Pamela Royston Macfie, Sam Pickering, Allen Reddick, Elizabeth A. Skomp, and Diane Thiel. Send inquiries to Meg Binnicker at 735 University Avenue, Sewanee TN 37383-1000.
Sewanee is also home to America’s oldest literary quarterly, the Sewanee Review. Now in its 118th year of publication, the Review has published some of the most influential writers and critics of its time.
Enjoying what one contemporary poet has called Sewanee’s “remoteness without cultural dislocation,” many writers have come here to live and work. Among them are William Alexander Percy, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Taylor, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Monroe Spears, Katherine Anne Porter, Walter Percy, James Agee, Caroline Gordon, Jean Stafford, Randall Jarrell, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Richard Tillinghast, and, more recently, Wyatt Prunty, Andrew Hudgins, and Erin McGraw. The University is delighted to see new generations of writers drawn to Sewanee by the Conference.