Program
We offer an MFA in creative writing. Our program is designed for the student seeking an immersive writing experience with our acclaimed faculty.
Sewanee School of Letters
Earn your MFA in creative writing starting next summer on our beautiful mountaintop campus
Announcement
Announcement
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Who We Are
Summers-only. Exceptional faculty. Epic literary community.
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What We Do
We offer an MFA in creative writing. Learn about the program and courses.
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What We've Done
Read about our literary partnerships, which bring noted writers and workshops to campus. Learn about our student and alumni successes.
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Apply Now
Isn’t it time to find your community in Sewanee?
Earn Your MFA in the Summers
The School of Letters is a summertime MFA in creative writing in Sewanee, Tennessee, home to a long-standing literary tradition. Our students come from different backgrounds, locations, and professions, but they all have one thing in common—a desire to be a part of a community of writers.
For six weeks every summer, our students and faculty work and live on our mountaintop campus, immersing themselves in writing and literature. Classes are both intimate and rigorous, with a supportive and friendly atmosphere. Weekly readings and lectures by guests, faculty, and students provide further opportunities outside of the classroom. At the end of the term, students return home energized from the work they've done and looking forward to another summer in Sewanee.
It's time to find your community at Sewanee. We can't wait to meet you.
Our students are ambitious and passionate about their studies and writing. They come from different backgrounds, experiences, and locations, but connect each summer on our mountaintop campus in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Our Students
50%
Are high school teachers
About half of our students are teachers in public and independent schools around the country. But that's not all they do. They are writers, physicians, CEOs, singer-songwriters, and more. They seek a graduate program that fits their busy lives. Above all, they have a desire to learn.
50-60
Students enrolled each summer
But it's more than the numbers. During the summers, our students become a part of a community. While on campus, students interact closely with peers and faculty through workshops, lectures, and readings, building relationships that last beyond their time at Sewanee. They live and breathe literature and writing, finding their place in Sewanee's more than 100-year-old literary community.
132
Graduates
Our students include Dana Award and Sinclair Award recipients, Pushcart Prize finalists, and a Grammy Award winner. They've presented papers at conferences, received prestigious fellowships, and have been recognized for their teaching abilities. They've become principals and heads of schools, editors, and Ph.D. students. They have become actors, professors, and workshop leaders. They have published their works in literary magazines, poetry collections, and memoirs.
Our Faculty
Chris Bachelder
MFA Faculty
Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels The Throwback Special, Abbott Awaits, U.S.!, Bear v. Shark, and Lessons in Virtual Photography. His short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Mother Jones, The Cincinnati Review, and New Stories from the South. His novel Abbott Awaits was published in 2011, to strong reviews: “Not since John Cheever,” said novelist Brock Clark, “has an American male fiction writer written so ingeniously, so beautifully, so heartbreakingly about the pain and sweetness of domestic life.'' His acclaimed novel The Throwback Special was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book follows twenty-two men who meet each year to reenact the 1985 Joe Theismann football injury. Bachelder was awarded the prestigious Terry Southern Prize in 2016. He received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and taught at New Mexico State, Colorado College, and the University of Massachusetts before joining the creative writing faculty of the University of Cincinnati in 2011.
Workshop in Fiction Writing
Barbara Black
Literature Faculty
Barbara Black is the author of three classic studies of Victorian literature and culture: On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000); A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland (2012); and Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and its Stories (2019). When On Exhibit appeared in 2000, critic Joseph Childers praised it for “[beginning] in very important ways to unravel the representation of culture to itself.” A Room of His Own, nominated as Best Book of 2013 by the North American Victorian Studies Association, was lauded as “an absorbing and enlightening study” by the Times Literary Supplement and as a “beautifully conceived, thoroughly researched, and deftly argued book” by scholar Karen Chase Levenson. Most recently, Black's new book, Hotel London, was awarded a 2020 Book Award from the Victorian Society in America and exalted by critic Jacqueline Banerjee for "skill in combining cultural theory with social and personal history."
Black’s essays and reviews—on Dickens, Wilde, Gissing, Fitzgerald, among others—have appeared in Salmagundi, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, and Dickens Studies Annual, among other journals, as well as in the book Dickens and Gender (2012). Barbara Black earned an AB at Bryn Mawr College and a PhD at the University of Virginia. She currently serves as professor of English at Skidmore College, where she was recently honored with the Ralph A. Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching. Barbara Black is the review editor for the international journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.
Special Topics in British Literature: The Brontë Sisters
Tiana Clark
MFA Faculty
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, The Washington Post, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Workshop in Poetry Writing
Virginia Craighill
Literature Faculty
Virginia Ottley Craighill has been teaching at Sewanee since 2001 and is also a graduate of the University of the South (C’82), the University of Georgia, and the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches 19th century and modern American literature (especially Tennessee Williams), literary journalism, creative non-fiction, and literature by women. Her work has been published in the Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, Chattahoochee Review, Best American Sports Writing 2019, and Kalliope, among others.
The Life and Literature of Tennessee Williams
Sidik Fofana
MFA Faculty
Sidik Fofana received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. He has taught at NYU and in public schools in Brooklyn. His novel Stories from our Tenants Downstairs is forthcoming from Scribner in the US and Hodder in the UK in 2021. His stories, including "The Okiedoke" and "The Rent Manual," have appeared in the Sewanee Review. His work has also been published in Granta, and he was a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow.
You can hear Sidik read from "The Rent Manual" here:
Workshop in Fiction
Allen Reddick
Literature Faculty
Allen Reddick is the author of The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746-1773 (1996) and the editor of Johnson's Unpublished Revisions of his Dictionary: A Facsimile Edition with Commentary and Analysis (2005), both published by Cambridge University Press, as well as articles concerning English literature from the 17th through the 18th century. A graduate of Sewanee, he earned an MA from Cambridge, a PhD from Columbia, and began his teaching career in 1985 at Harvard, where he served as assistant, then associate professor of English. In 1993 he took up his current post as professor of English literature at the University of Zurich. His scholarly work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the British Academy, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, among others. He is currently tracing the vast book distribution activities of the 18th-century radical Thomas Hollis. He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London for his work on the library of Carl Linnaeus.
Pictorial Transformations in Literature and Painting
John Jeremiah Sullivan
MFA Faculty
Winner of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Southern editor of the Paris Review. Previously he was an editor at Harper's, Oxford American, and GQ Magazine. His prize-winning first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, was published in 2004. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker. His journalism and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times, Harper's, Oxford American, GQ, and the Paris Review. Many of these pieces are gathered in his book Pulphead, which has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Winner of two National Magazine Awards, the Whiting Writer's Award, and a 2015 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and two daughters.
Workshop in Nonfiction Writing
Alexander Chee Named 2021 John Grammer Fellow
Thanks to the generosity of the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, author Alexander Chee will be joining us in 2021 as the John Grammer Fellow. Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
The Washington Post praised Edinburgh (2001) as “A coming-of-age tale in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death.” People magazine described The Queen of the Night (2016) as a “Sweeping, richly detailed” novel. NPR called it “Sprawling, soaring, bawdy, and plotted like a fine embroidery.” It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and was named a best book of the year by Esquire, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Buzzfeed, and NPR. Of Chee’s career-spanning essay collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel (2018), author and critic Garth Greenwell says, “I'm astonished by the wisdom of these essays, and how beautiful they are. A riveting account of activism and artistry, as well as a profound exploration of the intersections of identities and experiences that build up this novelist's composite eye. Alexander Chee is brilliant and brave in equal measure, and has written an essential book about how to survive as an artist in America today.”
The award, made possible by a gift from the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, brings a noted writer or scholar to Sewanee for an extended visit each summer during the School of Letters' academic term. The John Grammer Fellow is named in honor of founding School of Letters Director John Grammer and their reading is a part of the Summer Reading and Lecture Series.
(Photo by Robert Gill.)
Student awards and publications
Maggie Blake Bailey, L'17 | Poet and High School Teacher
She holds degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Brown, but it's her MFA from the School of Letters that Maggie holds most dear. Clearly a lover of learning, Maggie applied to Sewanee because she wanted to study and write poetry. Just five years later, in 2015, Maggie published her first chapbook, Bury the Lede, and in 2020 published her first full-length collection, Visitation. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice and her work can be found in Tar River Poetry, Still: The Journal, SWWIM, and others. She was also instrumental in establishing the John Grammer Fellowship through the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, which brings a noted writer for an extended stay during the summer session.
Clay Byars, L'18 | Writer and Consulting Editor
Nearly two decades after beginning his undergraduate degree at Sewanee, Clay returned to start his MFA. He was working on a memoir about an experience that happened to him during his earlier stint at Sewanee and was hoping to get it published. After surviving a head-on collision during his sophomore year, Clay underwent an experimental surgery to restore movement to his right arm, which had been injured in the accident. Following surgery, however, Clay suffered a massive brain-stem stroke. He was left completely paralyzed. Despite a grim prognosis, Clay’s condition began to very slowly improve. As he relearned to walk and speak, he also found his way to writing, calling it a “healing obsession.” Clay would eventually earn his undergraduate degree from Sewanee. At the School of Letters, Clay reconnected with essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan, his friend from undergrad who was also now his nonfiction instructor. Sullivan would go on to mentor Clay as he wrote Will & I, his debut memoir published in 2016. “The School of Letters is one of the undiscovered secrets of the literary world. It really helped shape my vision of what I could do.”
Dwight Gray, L'16 | Veteran, Poet, and Teacher
Retired from the U.S. Army, Dwight enrolled in the School of Letters because he had something to say. Dwight also came to the School of Letters to find a community of passionate readers and writers with whom he could discuss the writing life. Time with professors and fellow students outside of class and time alone in nature became just as meaningful as the work in the classroom. In this brief and intense six-week period, there was not a moment to be wasted. A poet, Dwight would go on to publish two books of poetry, including his debut collection Overwatch in 2011 followed by Contested Terrain in 2017. His work can also be found in the Sewanee Review, Appalachian Heritage, Still: The Journal, and others.
Lindsey Harding, L'14 | Writer and Professor
Part rigorous academic study, part creative hamlet—for Lindsey, the School of Letters was everything she didn’t know she needed. Within the first week of her first summer, though, she was sure she was somewhere special. A fiction writer, Lindsey spent her summers workshopping short stories with guidance from professors like Ellen Slezak, Michael Griffith, and Chris Bachelder. Since graduating, she’s written a novel and signed with a literary agent. She also completed a PhD in English from the University of Georgia, where she serves as director of the Writing Intensive Program. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Gordon Hight, L'19 | Writer, photographer, and fly fishing guide
Gordon’s goal was simple: to learn how to write well. An accomplished photographer who also boasts a BA in economics and an MBA in finance, he wanted to find ways to blend his images and stories. Today his photos and nonfiction have appeared in Paste Magazine, 35mm Magazine, and The Drake Magazine. Through relationships built at the School of Letters, Gordon has also executive produced two feature films. (Did we mention he’s also a fly fishing guide?) “My life has been blessed by some incredible educational opportunities, but Sewanee is hands down the best and most dear to me.”
Henry Langhorne, L'16 | Retired Cardiologist
Earning an MFA from the same university he graduated from in 1953 meant Henry was able to make good on a young man’s dream. Unable to pursue creative writing in undergrad due to the rigors of his pre-med program, returning to Sewanee to study poetry after 50 years as a cardiologist was its own special kind of homecoming. Henry was the Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida from 1999 to 2009, and his poetry can be found in many publications, including the Sewanee Review, Hurricane Review, and Panhandler Magazine, and he has published nine books.
Darby Lyons, L'16 | Sr. Editorial Assistant
As a full-time teacher, Darby craved time and space to write poetry. At the School of Letters, away from the day-to-day distractions of the classroom and life at home, she was able to immerse herself in a community of writers, hone her craft, and devote her attention fully to the creation of new work. Darby’s work has appeared in SWWIM Every Day, 8 Poems, Mud Season Review, and others. She also serves as senior editorial assistant at The Cincinnati Review.
Donna Mintz, L'16 | Visual Artist and Writer
A critically acclaimed visual artist with work hanging in the permanent collections at the High Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Mobile Museum of Art, Donna longed for a return to an academic setting after years of solitary art making. She completed her MFA with a concentration in nonfiction and is currently at work on an essay collection on James Agee and his masterwork, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. “School of Letters offered the four best summers of my life. I would live each of them over in its entirety if given the chance.”
Hannah Palmer, L'11 | Writer and Urban Planner
Hannah believes the stars aligned the day she opened Oxford American and saw an ad for the School of Letters. After years in New York City working in publishing, she’d moved back to her childhood home of Atlanta where she was trying, without much success, to make more space for writing. Sensing the summers-only program perched atop the Cumberland Plateau was her next right move, Hannah applied. Instructors like John Jeremiah Sullivan and Angus Fletcher led Hannah’s nonfiction workshops and literary classes as she began what would become her thesis and eventually her debut memoir, Flight Path, published in 2017. Part memoir, part urban history, Hannah’s book examines the loss of her childhood homes in the wake of the expansion of Atlanta’s airport.
Kate Parrish, L'19 | Freelance Writer
With a career in corporate marketing steadily on the rise for a decade, Kate decided to quit her job to return to school and become a full-time writer. Only she had no idea how to actually do that. More than anything, Kate came to the School of Letters to find community. While pursuing her MFA, she cultivated the discipline and persistence required of any successful writer, and also, more importantly, formed relationships that have opened professional doors and led to lifelong friendships. Her work can be found in Parade, SELF, GOOD, Teen Vogue, and others.
Billy Pullen, L'14 | Teacher
As a teacher, writer, and actor, Billy makes wearing many hats look easy. As a playwright, his one-act play won the Grand Festival Prize in New York City’s Theatre Row, and he received the Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. As a writer, his essays have been published in Narrative, PLOTS, and others. His memoir was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most importantly to Billy, he was also named a Tennessee Teacher of the Year. Concentrating in creative nonfiction, he earned his MFA at the School of Letters.
Megan Roberts, L'13 | Teacher
Megan wanted to see if she could write a novel, so she applied to the School of Letters. Turns out that not only could she write a novel, but she could write a pretty excellent one, earning an honorable mention from the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. As important as advancing her writing skills, joining a supportive community of dedicated writers and thinkers was invaluable. “I knew the School of Letters faculty were accomplished, but I didn't know they would be so generous. My professors have become lifelong creative writing mentors.” Megan’s work can be found in NELLE, SLICE, and the Tulane Review.
Amanda Shires, L'17 | Singer-Songwriter
After spending much of her life on vans and tour buses, Amanda, a singer-songwriter, fiddle player, and poet, craved the stimulation of school. In an interview with Southern Living, the Grammy Award-winning artist said of her decision to pursue an MFA at the School of Letters, “I am fascinated by words, down to the letters that make them up. I wanted to learn more about poetics and how to get better at writing.” Now with six solo albums (and an MFA) under her belt, Amanda is a seasoned storyteller and performer. She credits what she learned at the School of Letters for making her a more precise and intentional songwriter.
Jacqui Swift, L'19 | Creative Writing Instructor
After earning her undergraduate degree at a large state school, Jacqui, a poet and spoken word artist, was pleasantly surprised by the relationships she developed with her professors and visiting authors at the School of Letters. Class hikes, generative workshops at an instructor’s home, or just a shared meal that transcended the traditional professor-student hierarchy, Sewanee offered Jacqui intimate access to those entrusted with guiding her work. Jacqui teaches both creative writing and performance art at Southern Word, helping her students find both their voice on the page and their stage legs. She has taught and performed at the International Youth Speaks Festival.
Sam Worley, MFA Candidate | Writer and Editor
A current MFA candidate, Sam, who boasts bylines with The Awl, Epicurious, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many more, started at the School of Letters to deepen his expertise in his current field of nonfiction writing. Through his coursework, however, namely the non-writing, literary criticism classes, fiction writing seems to have nosed its way into Sam’s world. It’s one of the unexpected benefits of the School of Letters experience: the flexibility to pursue emerging interests all while under the mentorship of brilliant professors and alongside equally curious, passionate classmates. Sam is currently serving as the deputy editor of Atlanta Magazine.
Sewanee School of Letters
Summer 2022 Session Dates: June 5 - July 15
MFA Program
Alexander Chee Named 2021 Grammer Fellow
The award, made possible by a gift from the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, brings a noted writer or scholar to Sewanee for an extended visit each summer during the School of Letters' academic term.
