Celebrating its twenty-eighth summer session, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference will run from Tuesday, July 18, through Sunday, July 30, and feature readings, panels, and lectures by nationally-recognized faculty, editors, publishers, and literary agents.
The Conference will begin with a reading by fiction writer Christine Schutt on July 18th at 8:15 PM. All readings and lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the University of the South’s Mary Sue Cushman Room of the Bairnwick Women’s Center.
Christine Schutt is the author of two short-story collections, Nightwork (Alfred A. Knopf) and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer (TriQuarterly Books), and three novels, Florida (TriQuarterly Books), a National Book Award finalist; All Souls (Harcourt), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Prosperous Friends (Grove Press). Among other honors, Schutt has twice been selected for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories and recently appeared in the New American Stories anthology from Vintage. She is the recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, and she lives and teaches in New York.
The first week will also feature readings by fiction writers Jeffery Renard Allen, Allan Gurganus, Alice McDermott, and Tim O’Brien; poets B.H. Fairchild, Mary Jo Salter, and A.E. Stallings; and playwright Naomi Iizuka.
The second week will feature readings by fiction writers Richard Bausch, Adrianne Harun, Randall Kenan, Margot Livesey, Jill McCorkle, and Steve Yarbrough; poets Mark Jarman, Maurice Manning, Charles Martin, Marilyn Nelson, Wyatt Prunty, and Sidney Wade; and playwrights Dan O’Brien and Ken Weitzman.
Editors from 5E, 32 Poems, Algonquin Books, The American Scholar, Blackbird, Boulevard, Copper Canyon Press, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, Grand Central Publishing, Grove Atlantic, The Hopkins Review, Knopf, Lookout Books, LSU Press, Mike Levine Editorial, The Missouri Review, The New Criterion, New Directions, Northwestern University Press, The Sewanee Review, University of Arkansas Press, and The Weekly Standard will discuss publishing, as will agents from Aevitas Creative Management, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents, and The Wylie Agency.
Agents from The Gernert Company, ICM Partners, and The Williams Company will also be in attendance, and representatives from Actors Theatre of Louisville and Agency for the Performing Arts will meet with playwrights.
A complete Conference schedule can be found here. Authors’ books are available at the University Book & Supply Store.
Supported by the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund established through the estate of the late Tennessee Williams, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference offers instruction and criticism to writers through a series of workshops, readings, and craft lectures in poetry, fiction, and playwriting.
