Every summer the School of Letters invites writers, poets, publishers and scholars to speak each week that school is in session. All readings and lectures take place at Gailor Auditorium unless otherwise noted, and a reception usually follows upstairs in the atrium. The public is welcome. Events held outside of Sewanee are also listed here.
Tuesday, February 19
7:00 p.m.
Rumours East
1112 Woodland Avenue, Nashville
FREE, Reservations required at 615.262.5346
The Sewanee School of Letters and East Side Story present author Kevin Wilson and musician Amanda Shires at Rumours East in Nashville on Tuesday, February 19. Wilson will read from his sensational book The Family Fang or other original work followed by a musical performance by Amanda Shires.
East Side Story has partnered with Rumours East and WAMB 1200 AM/ 99.3 FM radio to present East Side Storytellin'—an evening of book readings, musical performances, and author/musician interviews designed to elaborate on the stories behind these creative processes. East Side Storytellin' is held at Rumours East, located at 1112 Woodland Street in East Nashville, the first and third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. School of Letters student Chuck Beard, owner of East Side Story, hosts the event which is recorded by WAMB to air on the radio station the following Saturday at 2:00 p.m. Recordings of the show may also be found on East Side Story’s website www.eastsidestorytn.com. This event is FREE but space is limited. Reservations may be made by calling Rumours East at 615.262.5346.
July 18, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Graduate students in the Sewanee School of Letters' MFA program will read: Maggie Blake (pictured), Billy Pullen, Cindie Miller, Darby Lyons, Ward Fleissner, Catherine Penney, Carly Gates, Dwight Gray, Kelly WIlkinson, Emelie Heltsey, and Matt Hummer. Photo: Mary Stafford
July 11, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Depending on whom you ask, Jane Borden is either an Arts and Entertainment magazine editor (primarily for Time Out New York), a journalist (in venues ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Modern Bride) a television writer (Saturday Night Live), and a stand-up comedian who has appeared on Comedy Central and VH-1. In fact she’s been all these things, and also a debutante, an undercover investigator, and the author of I Totally Meant to Do That, a comic memoir chronicling her adventures as a Southern girl set down in the wilds of Manhattan. Reviewers compared Borden to David Sedaris and even Mark Twain (“if you shaved the moustache, added lady-parts, and dropped him in present-day Manhattan, he’d end up writing this fabulous book,” said Ed Helms). The New York Times Magazine called it “lowbrow-brilliant.” Jane Borden grew up in North Carolina, attended the state university in Chapel Hill, and lived in New York for several years. Now she divides her time between there and Sewanee, where her husband Nathan Stogdill teaches at the University of the South. She’s hard at work adapting her memoir for a television series. Learn more about her at her web site: http://www.janeborden.com/.
July 2, 2012 at 5:00 am
For students only: Liz Van Hoose, Sewanee C'99, and Kevin Doughten are editors at Viking/Penguin. Liz is a fiction editor, and Kevin is a non-fiction editor and edited David Haskell's The Forest Unseen. These fabulous editors will bring word from book publishing's epicenter. They'll take your questions after a short presentation. Photo: Mary Stafford
June 27, 2012 at 4:30 pm
David Haskell is Professor of Biology at the University of the South, where he teaches courses in Ornithology, Evolutionary Biology, and Biodiversity. The author or co-author of many scientific papers in these disciplines, Haskell has recently turned his hand to a very different kind of writing in The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, published in March of this year. A genuinely novel literary experiment, The Forest Unseen follows the life—plant, animal, and human—of a single square meter of Tennessee old-growth forest over the course of a year. This patch of ground—“the mandala,” Haskell calls it—becomes a window through which the usually invisible occurrences of nature can be revealed as stories, revelations of the complex interrelationships connecting microorganisms, flora, fauna, and ourselves. The book is earning impressive reviews, the Wall Street Journal praising its “encompassing and generous vision,” and Kirkus, in a starred review, admiring the “extraordinary, intimate view of life” which it affords. The renowned naturalist E.O. Wilson calls The Forest Unseen “a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry.” For more information about Haskell, visit the web site for his book: : http://theforestunseen.com/ . Photo: Buck Butler.
June 20, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Poet Danny Anderson’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry, among other places. He is the author of two poetry collections, Drunk in Sunlight and January Rain, and the editor of The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. His honors include a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation. Educated at the University of Cincinnatti and The Johns Hopkins University, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.
Holly Goddard Jones will have a new book out spring 2013: The Next Time You See Me. Her first novel, Girl Trouble, was published by Harper Perennial in 2009 to enthusiastic acclaim from oracles as diverse as Erin McGraw and O magazine. Her fiction has appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review and been anthologized in New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories. A graduate of the University of Kentucky and the Ohio State University, she has taught at Denison University and Murray State University and now serves as Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Among her honors are the Peter Taylor Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. To learn more visit www.hollygoddardjones.com.
June 13, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Kevin Wilson, who grew up just a few miles from Sewanee, is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Tunnelling to the Center of the Earth and the even more acclaimed novel The Family Fang. Concerning the former, author Owen King wrote that “Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers,” adding “Jesus Christ this guy is good.” It won the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Library Association’s prestigious Alex Award. And as for The Family Fang, it has been praised by People as “a wacky wonderful debut” and by The Wall Street Journal for covering “complex psychological ground.” “Wilson’s inventive genius never stops for a rest break,” adds National Public Radio—and now comes the news that actress Nicole Kidman has bought rights to The Family Fang and will star in the movie herself. Once a dorm counselor for the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, Wilson received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from the University of Florida. He lives in Sewanee, where he serves as Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Creative Writing program. For more about Kevin Wilson, visit his website: www.wilsonkevin.com.
July 14, 2011 at 4:30 pm
David Wyatt is the author of several literary studies, a memoir, and a history of California. His writing in all these genres is characterized by its critical acumen and scholarly depth, its effortless interdisciplinarity and graceful prose, and by its willingness to surrender the scholar's mask of impersonality by foregrounding the critic's own life and experience. Reviewers found The Fall Into Eden, a literary history of his native state, "an elegant, graceful, and moving book, a kind of hymn to California," and they pronounced Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation "an uncanny, indispensable dialogue on the vexed relationship between art and society." The same virtues are on display in Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California, (an "elegiac salute to California, our strangest, saddest, most enchanting state") and his memoir of 9/11 and its aftermath, And the War Came (a work of "truly astonishing storytelling, an unprecedented combination of autobiography and reflective essay"). His newest is Secret Histories, an overview of modern American fiction from Frank Norris to Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy. David Wyatt has taught at the University of Virginia and is now Professor of English at the University of Maryland; he has won awards for teaching and scholarship at both institutions.
July 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Nick Flynn's works include two memoirs (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment), two poetry collections (Some Ether and Blind Huber), and a play (Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins). His new book of poetry, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, will be published in 2011. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for poetry, and a fellowship from the Library of Congress. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, and NPR's This American Life. "Flynn's authentic voice," reports The Village Voice, "holds us rapt, keeping both the tragic and the redemptive possibilities open." He has worked as a ship's captain, an electrician, and a case-worker at a homeless shelter, and currently teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program each spring. He has also served as the "field poet" on the Academy Award-nominated film Darwin's Nightmare. His own best-known book, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, will soon be a major motion picture. To learn more, visit Nick Flynn's website: www.nickflynn.org.
June 16, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Texas native Radney Foster is well known to Sewanee audiences, having graduated from the college and returned often to visit and play. As a performer he formed half of the successful duo “Foster and Lloyd” in the 1980’s, then went solo in 1992 with the release of Del Rio, TX, 1959. That record has been followed, so far, by seven others, including Labor of Love, Are You Ready for the Big Show?, and most recently, Revival. As a songwriter he is responsible for such songs as “Nobody Wins,” “Just Call Me Lonesome,” “I’m In,” and others, hits for himself and for such artists as Keith Urban, the Dixie Chicks, and Sara Evans, who calls him “one of the most talented singer/songwriters of our time.”
Darden Smith, another Texan, has been recording since 1986, with 13 albums to his credit now. Records such as Native Soil, Sunflower, Extra, Extra, and the recent Marathon have won commercial success and critical praise in both Britain and the United States. Sometimes likened to John Hiatt, Leonard Cohen, and Elvis Costello, Smith has been called (by the All Music Guide) “a singer-songwriter blessed with an uncommon degree of intelligence, depth, and compassion.”
July 1, 2010 at 4:30 pm
A native of Dallas, Texas, David Hudgins was educated at Duke University and the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University. After working as a trial and appellate lawyer at a Dallas firm for eight years, he gave up the law to pursue screenwriting, eventually the feature screenplay Scottsboro to LeVar Burton’s Eagle Nation Films. Since moving with his family to Los Angeles, he has worked on the television series Everwood and, for four seasons, as both screenwriter and Executive Producer of the acclaimed series Friday Night Lights. The program won the prestigious Peabody Award for Excellence in Television Broadcasting in its freshman season, and Mr. Hudgins has received three nominations for a Writers’ Guild Award for his work on it. In 2009 he created Past Life, a one-hour drama series for Warner Brothers Television and the Fox Network, and now serves as Showrunner and Executive Producer for the program.
June 30, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Philip Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, where he teaches courses in modern Comparative literature as well as British and American Fiction. He is the author of six critical books, including The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, and three splendid books concerning William Faulkner: Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns, What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, and, just last year, Becoming Faulkner. Recipient of several National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, Professor Weinstein is a former president of the William Faulkner Society.
January 16, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Dallas native Carol Wiley Cassella majored in English Literature at Duke University and graduated from Baylor College of Medicine in 1986. She practices anesthesia in Seattle and is a freelance medical writer specializing in global public health advocacy for the developing world. Her first novel, Oxygen, was published in 2008 to strong reviews. To The Denver Post it was “the work of a writer who is in full command of her craft,” to The Seattle Times “a strong first novel,” and to Susan Wiggs in WRITERS ARE READERS.COM, “a haunting debut novel…a story of tragedy and redemption, intricately plotted and told in a compelling voice.” Cassella lives in Bainbridge Island, Washington with her husband and their two sets of twins. Her second novel, Healer, is due out in July of this year.
July 8, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Stewart O'Nan is the indefatigably prolific author of the recently published Songs for the Missing, the recently filmed Snow Angels, and twelve other books. These include Last Night at the Lobster (about an unsuccessful seafood restaurant), A Prayer for the Dying (about a diphtheria epidemic in 19th-century Wisconsin), The Names of the Dead (about a Vietnam veteran and his problems), The Speed Queen (about a condemned serial killer writing to her favorite author, Stephen King) and Faithful (a non-fiction account of the 2004 baseball season which O'Nan co-wrote with none other than Stephen King, a friend and fellow Boston Red Sox fan). O'Nan is not, in other words, one of those writers who has only one story to tell and tells it over and over. Rather, his distinction (apart from the steady regularity with which he produces new books) is his remarkable ability to imagine lives radically unlike his own and unlike one another. O'Nan does find himself drawn to everyday people (Everyday People is, in fact, the title of one of his novels) and, according to a reviewer for the The New York Times, to "the terrors of everyday life-nightmares, violent crimes, wars-as a channel to the most intimate reaches of the human mind." Or, as a writer for The Boston Globe once put it, "O'Nan's gift has always been to make us look beyond the pretty picture, straight into the eye of the human condition." His works have been named "Notable Books of the Year" by the American Library Association and the New York Times, have been awarded the William Faulkner Prize and the Due Heinz Prize for Literature, and won him recognition as one of Granta magazine's 20 Best Young American Novelists. A graduate of Cornell University, he has taught there and at Trinity College and, in a previous career as an aerospace engineer, once worked on the Space Shuttle. Please visit http://stewart-onan.com/ (and countless other web sites) for more information about Stewart O'Nan and his work.
June 15, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and one of NPR's top five books of 2008; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection, winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and About.com's Best Poetry Book of 2006. She also authored the ground-breaking history Africans in America and the award-winning children's book Janna and the Kings. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals, and has been performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam's Poetry International, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.
July 9, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Timothy Steele is the author of five books of poetry, including Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems, The Color Wheel, and most recently Toward the Winter Solstice. He is equally well-known for his two important books on the place of meter in English verse: Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. He has also edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham and contributed articles and reviews to such journals as The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Times, and Modern Fiction Studies, and to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry and The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. His work has been recognized by, among other honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the SouthwestReview’s Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, and the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets.
June 23, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, having previously served on the faculties of Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and the University of California at Berkeley. Among his eight books on American Literature are several indispensable classics of the field: Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Faulkner: The House Divided, and To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. He is also the co-author of Volume 2 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, the editor of several essay-collections and anthologies, and the former editor of the Cambridge University Press book series in American Literature and Culture. Sundquist is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006 he was one of four recipients of the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award, known as “the richest prize in the humanities.”
June 17, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Ted Leeson studied physics at Marquette University and English literature at the University of Virginia, where he received his PhD in 1984. Since then he has taught literature and creative writing courses at Oregon State University, where he holds the rank of Senior Instructor. In the mean time he has emerged as one of the most eloquent personal essayists now at work, one whose work is often compared to that of Montaigne, Thoreau, Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard. This is all the more remarkable since, unlike Montaigne and the rest, Leeson writes mainly about fly-fishing. He has published essays and journalism in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Field and Stream, Fly Rod and Reel, and other magazines, and is the author of two well-received books, Jerusalem Creek and The Habit of Rivers. In 2007 Fly Rod and Reel magazine named him “Angler of the Year.”
July 12, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Claire Messud's first novel, When the World Was Steady, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her second,The Last Life, was a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year and an Editor's Choice at The Village Voice. They were followed by The Hunters, a collection of novellas, also a PEN/Faulkner finalist. All three books were New York Times Notable books of the Year. Her most recent book, The Emperor’s Children, has confirmed her reputation as one of the most accomplished young novelists in the United States by winning remarkable reviews and sales since its publication in August, 2006. Claire Messud has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, and a visiting writer at both Amherst and Sewanee, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
July 9, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Christopher Camuto is the author of three non-fiction books on the human and natural history of the southern Appalachian mountains: A Fly-Fisherman's Blue Ridge, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, and Hunting From Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He has published journalism in National Geographic and poetry in The Sewenee Review. Holder of the Ph.D. in English from the Unversity of Virginia, he teaches creative writing and American and Native American literature at Bucknell University.
July 3, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Jason Sommer holds degrees from Brandeis, Stanford (where he held the Mirrielees Fellowship in Poetry), and St. Louis University and has taught there, and at University College, Dublin. He has published three poetry collections (Lifting the Stone, Other People's Troubles, and The Man Who Sleeps in My Office) and the translator of three novellas by Wang Xiabobo. His verse has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other magazines, and in several anthologies, including The New American Poets. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the coveted Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, he has served since 1985 as Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Fontbonne University.
June 26, 2007 at 4:30 pm
A scholar of Southern and African American Literature, William Andrews is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt and the acclaimed To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography. Among his many edited works are The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology. He also edits North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, a massive digitized library which aspires to collect every American slave biography or autobiography. His most recent project has been to discover, edit, and re-publish Julia Collins's The Curse of Caste, the first novel published by an African American woman. William Andrews is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, where he also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities.
June 14, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Marjarie Garber is one of the most prolific and versatile scholars of her generation, the author or editor of books on dogs (Dog Love), houses (Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses), American Religion (One Nation Under God?). the Rosenberg Trial (Secret Agents), and many other topics. But she is best known for her scholarship on Shakespeare including the recent and award-winning Shakespeare After All, which distilled her thirty years of teaching a legendary course at Harvard and Yale. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other magazines and newspapers. Marjorie Garber serves as president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, as a senior trustee of the English Institute, and as William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.
June 11, 2007 at 4:30 pm
When James Wood's first book of criticism, The Broken Estate, appeared in 1999, it became common to call the thirty-four-year old author "the best literary critic of his generation." His admirers have included Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Cynthia Orick and Saul Bellow, with whom Wood taught a class at Boston University. He solidified his reputation with a second book of critical essays, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, and diversified it by writing a highly-praised novel, The Book Against God. James Wood serves as an editor of both The New Republic and The Kenyon Review and writes regularly for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He serves as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.
July 14, 2006 at 3:00 pm
John Hollander is simultaneously one of the leading poets and one of the most significant literary scholars of his generation. His poetic career was launched when W.H. Auden chose him for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1958, for A Crackling of Thorns, his first book. Since then he has published seventeen more books of poetry, including Types of Shape, Spectral Emanations, Powers of Thirteen, Tesserae, and Picture Window. His works of literary criticism include Rhyme’s Reason, The Work of Poetry, and others. As a scholarly editor he prepared the Library of America volumes Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and the Henry James: Complete Stories, among many others. His honors include the Bollingen Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
July 10, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Since 1980 Wyatt Prunty has published seven books of poetry, including What Women Know, What Men Believe, The Run of the House, Since the Noon Mail Stopped, and, most recently, Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems. He is also the author of the acclaimed critical book Fallen From the Symboled World: Precedents for the New Formalism. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale, Southern, Sewanee, and Kenyon Reviews, among other places. He has been the recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at the Johns Hopkins University (where he held the Elliot Coleman Chair), Washington and Lee University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; currently he serves as Carleton Professor of English at the University of the South, where he also directs the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
July 6, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Franklin Burroughs is one of the most distinguished writers of Creative Nonfiction at work today. He is the author of two books and many essays, both personal and academic. Billy Watson’s Croker Sack (1992), a collection of essays about the outdoors, was published in 1991; it was selected as an Editor’s Choice by The Book of the Month Club, was reprinted by the Quality Paperback club, and was translated into Japanese. Horry and the Waccamaw, a nonfiction narrative, was published in 1992 and reprinted in paperback (as The River Home) the following year. His essays have been published in Harper’s, Backpacker, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and many other magazines, and have been reprinted in Best American Essays and The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing. His work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and by the Editor’s Prize, given for the best essay published in The American Scholar for 2003. A graduate of the University of the South, Franklin Burroughs took the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard and served as Professor of English at Bowdoin College until his retirement in 2002.
June 29, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Manette Ansay began writing as a New Year's resolution on January 1, 1988 and published her first novel, Vinegar Hill, in 1994. Since then she has published three more novels (Sister, River Angel, and Midnight Champagne) a story-collection, Read This and Tell Me What it Says, and a memoir, Limbo. She's been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Friends of American Writers Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 Oprah Winfrey chose Vinegar Hill as her November Book Club Selection. Manette Ansay has taught at Vanderbilt University, Warren Wilson College, and the University of the South, and is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. Her newest book, the novel Blue Water, will be published this spring.
June 8, 2006 at 8:00 pm
John Irwin is equally distinguished as a poet and as a scholar of American and Comparative Literature. His major scholarly works are Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, American Hieroglyphic: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, and A Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story, which won both the Christian Gauss Prize from Phi Beta Kappa and the Aldo Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association. He has also published, under the pen name John Bricuth, three books of poetry: The Heisenberg Variations, Just Let Me Say This About That, and As Long as It's Big. Formerly the editor of The Georgia Review, John Irwin was for many years the chairman of the famous Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, where he still teaches as Decker Professor in the Humanities.