Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Daisy Foote

Daisy Foote (playwriting) is the author of numerous plays, including Bhutan, which was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award and featured on the main stage at New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse festival before its New York Premier at the Cherry Lane Theater; When They Speak of Rita, which was produced in an extended run by Primary Stages in New York; God’s Pictures, which was produced by the Indiana Repertory Theatre for their main stage; and Living with Mary, for which she was honored with the Roger L. Stevens Incentive Award in association with the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and in cooperation with the President's Committee for the Arts. This fall, her play Him will have its world premiere at Primary Stages in New York and her screenplay for The Church of Dead Girls, directed by Julian Jarrold, will also be filmed. She is currently at work on an original screenplay for Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Features. A proud member of the Dramatist Guild and Writers Guild of America, she was the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence in 2001-02 and again in 2003.

A.E. Stallings | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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A.E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings (poetry) studied Classics in Athens, Georgia, in the previous millennium, and now lives in Athens, Greece, where she serves as director of the poetry program at the Athens Centre. She has published three collections of poetry, including Archaic Smile (University of Evansville Press, 1999), Hapax (TriQuarterly Books, 2006), and Olives (TriQuarterly Books, 2012), as well as a verse translation of Lucretius’s philosophical epic, The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics, 2007). She is at work on a new translation of Hesiod for Penguin Classics. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, the 2008 Poets’ Prize, and the Benjamin H. Danks award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and a 2011 MacArthur fellow. She lives with the journalist John Psaropoulos and their two Argonauts, Jason and Atalanta.

Dave Smith | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Dave Smith

Dave Smith (poetry) is the author of many poetry collections, beginning in 1970 with Bull Island (Back Door Press). Subsequent volumes include The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (Harper & Row, 1985), Cuba Night (William Morrow, 1990), Night Pleasures: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), Fate’s Kite: Poems 1991-1995 (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1997), The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), Little Boats, Unsalvaged (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and Hawks on Wires (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). He is also the author of Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1985) and Hunting Men: Essays on Life in the Life of Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lyndhurst Foundation. In 1996 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry in the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University.

Maurice Manning | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Maurice Manning

Maurice Manning (poetry) is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning’s other books include A Companion for Owls (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and Bucolics (Mariner Books, 2007). He has held fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and The Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. In 2009 Manning was awarded the Hanes Poetry Prize by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Manning teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Kentucky.

Andrew Hudgins | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Andrew Hudgins

Andrew Hudgins (poetry) is the author of eight books of poetry, including Saints and Strangers, After the Lost War: A Narrative, The Never-Ending, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood, Babylon in a Jar, and American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994, 1998, and 2010). Ecstatic in the Poison was published as part of the Sewanee Writers’ Series (Overlook, 2003). A collection of his essays, The Glass Anvil, was published by The University of Michigan Press in 1997 and another, Diary of a Poem, in 2011. He was awarded the 1989 Poets’ Prize for After the Lost War. His other awards and honors include the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Witter Bynner Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Hanes Prize for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he is Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University. With his wife, fiction writer Erin McGraw, he resides in Columbus, Ohio.

Erin McGraw | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Erin McGraw

Erin McGraw (fiction) is the author of the novel The Baby Tree (Story Line Press, 2001), and three story collections, Bodies at Sea (University of Illinois Press, 1989), Lies of the Saints (Chronicle Books, 1996), which was listed as a Notable Book for 1996 by The New York Times and chosen as part of the Barnes & Noble Discovery Series in the same year, and The Good Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). Lies of the Saints also won the Ohioana Book Award in 1997. Her latest novel, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. Her fiction has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic, Beloit Fiction Journal, Crazy Horse, Ascent, California Quarterly, Story, Daedalus, Boulevard, Good Housekeeping, and the Southern Indiana, Georgia, Laurel, Southern, Kenyon, and North American reviews. Her essays have appeared in the Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Image, Poets & Writers, Catholic Digest, North American Review, and The Southern Review. She regularly reviews fiction for the Raleigh News & Observer. Recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ohio Arts Council, she teaches at The Ohio State University.

John Casey | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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John Casey

John Casey (fiction) is the author of a story collection, Testimony and Demeanor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), for which he won the Friends of American Writers Award. In addition to a collection of essays, Room for Improvement (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), and a novella, Supper at the Black Pearl (Lord John Press, 1995), he has written four novels: An American Romance (Atheneum, 1977), Spartina, The Half-life of Happiness, and Compass Rose (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, 1998, and 2010 respectively). Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989. His story “Avid” was published in Prize Stories 1988: The O. Henry Awards. He is the translator from the Italian of Alessandro Boffa's You're an Animal, Viskovitz! (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) and Linda Ferri’s Enchantments (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

John Casey has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and has held a resident fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. He was a judge for the 1994 National Book Award and, beginning in 1993, was a recipient of a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, a grant made through the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is a Professor of English literature at the University of Virginia.

Further Reading

Alice McDermott | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott (fiction) is the author of six novels: A Bigamist's Daughter (Random House, 1982), That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, Charming Billy, Child of My Heart, and After This (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2002, and 2006, respectively). She received the National Book Award in 1998 for Charming Billy. Her articles, reviews, and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, USA Today, Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Commonweal, and The Washington Post. A recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the 2008 Corrington Award for Literature, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, she has served on the faculty of American University, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of New Hampshire, and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College. She is currently the Richard A. Macksey Professor of Creative Writing in the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University. She lives with her family in Bethesda, Maryland.

Further Reading

Daniel Anderson | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Daniel Anderson

Daniel Anderson (poetry) has had work appear in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Sewanee Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry, and Southwest Review, among other places. He has published two books of poetry, Drunk in Sunlight (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and January Rain (Story Line Press, 1997), and edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2003). His honors include a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation. He currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.

Futher Reading

Margot Livesey | Our Faculty | Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey (fiction) is the author of seven novels—Homework (Viking, 1990; Picador, 2001), Criminals, The Missing World (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 and 2000, respectively), Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona (Henry Holt, 2001 and 2004), The House on Fortune Street (HarperCollins, 2008), and The Flight of Gemma Hardy (HarperCollins 2012)—and a collection of stories, Learning by Heart (Penguin, 1986). The fiction editor of Ploughshares, she has published stories in The New Yorker, Story, American Short Fiction, North American Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. "Obituary" was collected in the New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Short Fiction. Her essay, "How to Tell a True Story," which first appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, was reprinted in The Best Writing on Writing (Story Press, 1994). Margot Livesey grew up in Scotland and now lives in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has taught at a number of American colleges and universities, including Williams College, Boston University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of California at Irvine. Her current appointment is as a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. She has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Steve Yarbrough

Steve Yarbrough (fiction) is the author of three short-story collections, Family Men (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), Mississippi History, and Veneer (University of Missouri Press, 1994 and 1998), and five novels: The Oxygen Man (MacAdam/Cage, 1999, winner of the Mississippi Author's Award, the California Book Award, and an award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters), Visible Spirits (Knopf, 2001), Prisoners of War (Knopf, 2004, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), The End of California (Knopf, 2006), and Safe from the Neighbors (Knopf, 2010). He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize and was recently named winner of the 2010 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1999, Best American Mystery Stories 1998, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. A professor at Emerson College, he lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Mark Strand

Mark Strand (poetry) published his first poetry collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open (Stone Wall Press), in 1964. Others include Reasons for Moving, Darker, The Story of Our Lives (winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets), The Late Hour, Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980), The Continuous Life, and Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990 and 1993). Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Alfred A. Knopf published Man and Camel in 2006 and New Selected Poems the following year. He has translated collections of poems and written three volumes of art criticism—Art of the Real: Nine American Figurative Painters (Clarkson Potter, 1983), William Bailey (Abrams, 1987), and Edward Hopper (Ecco Press, 1994; Knopf, 2001)—as well as three children’s books. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987, he served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990. In 2004 he received the Wallace Stevens Prize from the Academy of American Poets and in 2009 he received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He teaches at Columbia University.

Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt (fiction) is the author of two short story collections, Nightwork (Knopf, 1996) and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer (TriQuarterly Books, 2005). Her first novel, Florida (TriQuarterly Books, 2003), was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls (Harcourt, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A third novel, Prosperous Friends, is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic in the fall of 2012. She has published fiction in Harper’s Magazine, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O. Henry Short Story Prize, as well as Pushcart and Mississippi Review fiction prizes. She is the recipient of NYFA and Guggenheim Fellowships. Schutt is a senior editor of NOON, a literary annual, and lives and teaches in New York.

Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter (poetry) is the author of six collections of poems, all published by Alfred A. Knopf: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize), Sunday Skaters (1994), A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), and A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008). Her edition of The Selected Poems of Amy Clampitt was published by Knopf in 2010. She has written a book for children, The Moon Comes Home (Knopf, 1989), and, with Margaret Ferguson and Jon Stallworthy, co-edited the fourth and fifth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1996 and 2004). She has held an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from other institutions including the Bogliasco, Rockefeller, Ingram Merrill, and Guggenheim foundations. A series of songs, Rooms of Light, written by jazz composer and pianist Fred Hersch to her lyrics, was performed at Lincoln Center in January 2007. Her play, Falling Bodies (2004), saw a new production at Infinity Box Theater in Seattle in 2012. She is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.

Sewanee Writers' Conference

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Dan O’Brien

Dan O’Brien (playwriting) was a Hodder Fellow Playwright-in-Residence at Princeton University, and the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His plays include The Cherry Sisters Revisited (Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival), The House in Hydesville (Geva Theatre Center), The Voyage of the Carcass (Stage 13/SoHo Playhouse; Page 73 Productions), The Dear Boy (Second Stage Theatre), Moving Picture (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Key West (Geva), Am Lit (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Lamarck (Perishable Theatre), as well as the new plays The Three Christs of Ypsilanti and The Body of an American. He has received commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Center Theatre Group, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Sloan/First Light Grant, Geva Theatre Center, and residencies and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Yaddo, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. His awards include the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborn Award. In 2002, 2003, and again in 2005, O’Brien was the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting at Sewanee.

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Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle (fiction) is the author of four story collections, all published by Algonquin Books—Crash Diet (1992), Final Vinyl Days (1998), Creatures of Habit (2001), and Going Away Shoes (2009), as well as five novels, also published by Algonquin and cited by The New York Times as Notable Books—The Cheer Leader (1984), July 7th (1984), Tending to Virginia (1987), Ferris Beach (1990), and Carolina Moon (1996). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Allure, Greensboro Review, The Southern Review, and Agni; it has been anthologized in New Stories from the South, New Stories by Southern Women, Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best American Short Stories 2002, 2004, and 2009. Recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature, she has taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, Harvard, Brandeis, and Bennington College. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she is currently on faculty at North Carolina State University.

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Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan (fiction) is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits (Grove Press, 1989), and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt, Brace, 1992), 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 (1992). He has written a young adult biography, James Baldwin: Author (Chelsea House, 1994), and two works of nonfiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), which was nominated for the Southern Book Award, and The Fire This Time (Melville House Books, 2007). He is also the author of the text for Norman Mauskopf’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (Twin Palms Publishers, TwelveTrees Press, 1997). Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. He now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson (poetry) was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). She is also the author of the poetry collections Pharaoh, Pharaoh, Pinion: An Elegy, Figure Studies, and Secure the Shadow (Louisiana State University Press, 1997, 2002, 2008, 2012 respectively). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. They have been anthologized, among other places, in Buck and Wing: Southern Poetry at 2000; Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry; and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia. Claudia Emerson is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Donald Justice Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at The University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

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Tony Earley

Tony Earley (fiction) is the author of a story collection, Here We Are in Paradise (Little, Brown, 1994), which 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, came out with Little, Brown in 2000. His second novel, The Blue Star (Little, Brown), a sequel to Jim the Boy, appeared in 2008. A collection of personal essays, Somehow Form a Family, was published by Algonquin in 2001. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Esquire, Witness, and TriQuarterly, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South (the 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2006 collections), The Scribner’s Anthology of Short Fiction, Best American Short Stories (the 1993 and 1994 collections), and elsewhere. Winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award in 1991 and the National Magazine Award in 1994, he held a Tennessee Williams Fellowship as Writer-in-Residence at The University of the South in 1997. He is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

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Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch (fiction) published his first novel, Real Presence (The Dial Press), in 1980. Ten others include Take Me Back (The Dial Press, 1981, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award); The Last Good Time (Dial/Doubleday, 1984, released as a feature-length motion picture by Samuel Goldwyn Jr., 1995); Mr. Field's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 1989); Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea (HarperCollins, 1996); Hello to the Cannibals (HarperCollins, 2002, winner of The Virginia Prize for Fiction); Thanksgiving Night (HarperCollins, 2006); and, most recently, Peace (Knopf, 2008). His first collection of stories, Spirits (Simon & Schuster, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award) appeared in 1987. It was followed by The Fireman's Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1990), Rare & Endangered Species (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1994), The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (The Modern Library, 1996), Someone to Watch Over Me (Harper Flamingo, 1999), The Stories of Richard Bausch (HarperCollins, 2003), Wives & Lovers: 3 Short Novels (Harper Perennial Paperback Original, 2004), and Something Is Out There (Knopf, 2010). Among other honors and awards, he has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, for Peace, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he holds the Moss Chair of Excellence at The Writing Program of The University of Memphis.