Faculty

Fiction

Tony Earley

Tony Earley is the author of two story collections, Here We Are in Paradise, which won him recognition from Granta and The New Yorker as one of America’s best young fiction writers, and Mr. Tall. His novels are Jim the Boy and its sequel, The Blue Star. Earley is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Adrianne Harun

Adrianne Harun is the award-winning author of two collections of stories, The King of Limbo and Catch, Release, and a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in a Mountain, winner of the 2015 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel in crime fiction. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshops at Pacific Lutheran University.

Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michael Knight

Michael Knight is the author of three novels, a book of novellas, and three collections of short stories, including his most recent work, Eveningland. He lives in Knoxville with his wife and two daughters and teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.

Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey is the author of a collection of stories and eight novels, most recently, Mercury. Her collection of essays about writing, The Hidden Machinery, was published by Tin House. She is a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason’s first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for several other awards. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her novels include In Country and most recently, The Girl in the Blue Beret. Her newest book, Patchwork, is a reader containing selections from her stories, novels, and essays. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Mason lives in Kentucky.

Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle is the author of six novels, most recently Life After Life, and four story collections. Her stories have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, New Stories by Southern Women, Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature, she teaches in the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien is the author of seven novels, including Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award, and The Things They Carried, which was named by The New York Times as one of the 20 best books of the last quarter century and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novels have sold more than six million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages. His new work of nonfiction, Dad's Maybe Book, will be published in the autumn of 2019. He currently teaches at Texas State University.

Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt is the author of three short-story collections: Nightwork; A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer; and Pure Hollywood. She is also the author of three novels, Florida, All Souls, and Prosperous Friends. She has been a finalist in fiction for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Schutt lives and teaches in New York.

Steve Yarbrough

Steve Yarbrough is the author of three story collections, Family Men, Mississippi History, and Veneer, one nonfiction book, and seven novels, most recently, The Unmade World. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the 2010 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, and the 2015 Robert Penn Warren Award. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a professor at Emerson College.

Naomi Iizuka

Naomi Iizuka 's plays include 36 Views, Polaroid Stories, Anon(ymous), Good Kids, and Language of Angels. Her plays have been produced at Berkeley Rep, the Goodman, the Guthrie, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Public Theatre, among others. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, and a Whiting Award. Iizuka heads the MFA playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego.

Dan O’Brien

Dan O’Brien’s plays include The Body of an American, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, The Cherry Sisters Revisited, The Voyage of the Carcass, The Dear Boy, and many others. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art, the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, two PEN America Awards for Drama, and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award. He is also a librettist and an award-winning poet.

B.H. Fairchild

B.H. Fairchild is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2005, Fairchild was honored with the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review for the body of his work. He lives in Claremont, California.

Robert Hass

Robert Hass is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected. His collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Hass has also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He has served as poet laureate of the United States and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. He is currently a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman has published 11 books of poetry, most recently The Heronry, and two collections of essays on poetry. Honors for his work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine. Jarman is currently Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Maurice Manning

Maurice Manning has written six books of poetry. His most recent work, One Man’s Dark, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. Manning teaches at Transylvania University and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Kentucky.

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson, a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, is the author or translator of numerous poetry books for adults and children, most recently, How I Discovered Poetry and American Ace. She was awarded the Frost Medal in 2012 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2013. In 2017, she received the NSK Neustadt Prize in Children’s Literature and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry. She is a former poet laureate of the state of Connecticut.

Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight poetry collections from Knopf, including A Phone Call to the Future: Selected Poems, Nothing by Design, and The Surveyors, her most recent. She is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Sixth Edition), which was released in 2018. Salter has been granted fellowships from the NEA as well as the Bogliasco, Rockefeller, Ingram Merrill, and Guggenheim foundations. She is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

A.E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Like, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has translated Lucretius’ philosophical epic, The Nature of Things, and Hesiod’s almanac, Works and Days. A MacArthur fellow, she lives in Athens, Greece.

Sidney Wade

Sidney Wade is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Bird Book, published by Atelier26. Her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, and The Paris Review, among others. She served as the poetry editor of Subtropics and as president of AWP and secretary/treasurer for the American Literary Translators Association. She taught for many years in the MFA@FLA Creative Writing Program at the University of Florida.

Charles Martin

Charles Martin is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Future Perfect, which was published in 2018. His verse translation of Euripides' Medea will be published this fall by the University of California Press. His verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and recently taught at the Sewanee School of Letters and the Stonecoast MFA program.

Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, most recently The Ninth Hour, which received France's Prix Femina in 2018. Her fourth novel, Charming Billy, received the National Book Award in 1998. She is a recipient of the Whiting Award, the Corrington Award for Literature, the American Book Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, she is currently the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Wyatt Prunty

Wyatt Prunty is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Couldn’t Prove, Had to Promise. He founded and directs the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship program. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Johns Hopkins, and Brown Foundation fellowships and has served as Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and editor of the Sewanee Writers’ Series. He is currently editor of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series.