Faculty

Fiction

Jeffery Renard Allen

Jeffery Renard Allen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and the author of five books, including two award-winning novels, Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank. His short story collection Holding Pattern won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He has also received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a residency at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch is the author of 12 novels and nine collections of stories, most recently the collection Living in the Weather of the World. In addition to other honors, he has received the Rea Award in the Short Story. Past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he is a creative writing professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.

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 author of a collection of stories, The King of Limbo, a Sewanee Writers' Series selection and a Washington State Book Award finalist; a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in a Mountain, winner of the 2015 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel in crime fiction; and the forthcoming story collection Catch, Release. 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 two 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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason’s first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, In Country, is taught widely in classes, and her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her newest novel is The Girl in the Blue Beret, and a reader, Patchwork, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She 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 serves on faculty in the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

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, with a fourth novel on the way. She has been a finalist in fiction for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She 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.

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, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award. He is also a librettist and an award-winning poet.

Lauren Yee

2017/18 season: Cambodian Rock Band (music by Dengue Fever) at South Coast Rep; The Great Leap at Denver Center, Seattle Rep, Atlantic Theatre. Upcoming: Cambodian Rock Band at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Victory Gardens; The Great Leap at the Guthrie, American Conservatory Theatre, Arts Club, InterAct Theatre; King of the Yees at Baltimore Center Stage, SF Playhouse; and The Song of Summer at Trinity Rep. Honors: Kesselring Prize, Primus Prize, upcoming Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List. Commissions: Geffen, La Jolla, Lincoln Center/LCT3, Mixed Blood, Portland Center Stage, Second Stage, Trinity Rep. BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD. www.laurenyee.com

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, Paris Review, Poetry, 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.

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 December 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.

Charles Martin

Charles Martin is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Future Perfect, which will be published March 2018 by Johns Hopkins University 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.

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.

A.E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Olives; a fourth, Like, is forthcoming 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.

Greg Williamson

Greg Williamson is the author of four poetry collections, including A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck and The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True. With Daniel Groves, he is co-editor of Jiggery Pokery: Semicentennial, an anthology of contemporary double dactyls. He has received an Academy Award in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and an NEA Grant in Poetry. He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus is the author of five books, including Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, and Local Souls. He has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, and the National Magazine Prize.

Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, most recently The Ninth Hour. 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.

Caki Wilkinson

Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections Circles Where the Head Should Be and The Wynona Stone Poems. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nation, The Yale Review, the Kenyon Review, and other magazines. She lives in Memphis and directs the creative writing program at Rhodes College.

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.