Past Faculty

Kelly Grey Carlisle is the author of the memoir We Are All Shipwrecks. Set in Los Angeles, it tells the story of her mother’s murder, possibly at the hands of the Hillside Stranglers, and Carlisle’s eccentric childhood living on a boat with her grandfather, a larger-than-life Englishman and purveyor of pornography. In a starred review, Library Journal calls it “moving and complex...an exquisitely written tale of perseverance and unconditional love.” The Dallas Morning News calls it a “dazzling debut.” Carlisle’s personal essays have appeared in journals like Ploughshares, Salon.com, The Rumpus, New England Review, The Sun, and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been cited four times in Best American Essays. She is a 1998 graduate of Sewanee, where she earned departmental honors in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She lives in San Antonio, where she is an associate professor of English at Trinity University and is currently working on a book about Durham Cathedral, an 11th century cathedral church in the Northeast of England.

Lee Conell is the author of the novel The Party Upstairs, which was awarded the Wallant Award, as well as the story collection Subcortical, which was awarded The Story Prize Spotlight Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and an American Fiction Award. She has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, and writing fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Willapa Bay AiR, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, Millay Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vanderbilt University, and the Yiddish Book Center. She is currently a Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Program Fellow. Her writing appears in the Oxford American, Guernica, ZYZZYVA, Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere; her stories have won the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, and have been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY) and has also taught fiction writing at Tufts University, Vanderbilt University, Sewanee: The University of the South, Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital, and the Nashville Public Library.

Virginia Ottley Craighill began teaching at Sewanee in 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 taught 19th century and modern American literature (especially Tennessee Williams), literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and literature by women. Craighill recently retired from teaching full-time to focus on her writing, though she did come out of retirement to teach an undergraduate course on the life and literature of Tennessee Williams just two years later. Her work has been published in the Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, Chattahoochee Review, Best American Sports Writing 2019, and Kalliope, among others.

 Vievee Francis is an American poet and educator. She is the author of three poetry collections: Blue-Tail Fly (2006), Horse in the Dark (2012), which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize and Forest Primeval (2017), which won the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award. She published another collection in 2023, titled The Shared World.

Francis is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Prize, awarded by the Sewanee Review to a distinguished poet. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Rona Jaffe Award. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Kresge Foundation. She earned her BA from Fisk University and her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has also appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and many others. She is currently an associate editor for Callaloo and is an associate professor at Dartmouth College.

John Grammer, professor of English at the University of the South, teaches classes in British and American literature, American Studies, and Sewanee’s interdisciplinary Humanities Program. He received a BA at Vanderbilt University and a PhD at the University of Virginia. His 1996 book Pastoral and Politics in the Old South won the C. Hugh Holman Award as the best book of the year in Southern literary study. His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Oxford American, Southern Literary Journal, Sewanee Review and other journals, and in such books as The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and Blackwell’s Guide to the Literature and Culture of the American South.

Michael Griffith's books are Trophy, Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories and Spikes: A Novel; his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Salmagundi, Oxford American, Southwest Review, Five Points, Virginia Quarterly Review, Golf World, and The Washington Post, among other periodicals. He is completing a new nonfiction book called Windfalls in the Bone Orchard. His work has been honored by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Humanities Center, the Taft Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Michael Griffith was educated at Princeton and Louisiana State University. Formerly associate editor of the Southern Review, he is now professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and fiction editor of The Cincinnati Review. He is also the editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original-fiction series from LSU Press.

Jessica Goudeau’s first book, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her next nonfiction book, We Were Illegal, was named one of “19 Nonfiction Books to Read This Summer” and an Editor’s Choice book by the New York Times and an NPR “Book of the Day,” and received a starred review from Kirkus. She has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue, among many other places, and is a former columnist for Catapult. She produced projects for Teen Vogue (“Ask a Syrian Girl”) and “A Line Birds Cannot See,” a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the US on her own that was distributed by the New Yorker. Goudeau spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, Texas and was the co-founder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years until it successfully ended when the last artisan found full-time employment. She is the co-host and producer, with Christine Renee Miller, of “The Beautiful and Banned,” a weekly conversational podcast about banned books, plays, and films now and throughout history. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas, served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and Interim Writing Center Director at Southwestern University, was a Visiting Professor at Sewanee School of Letters, and teaches Creative Nonfiction at Wilkes University.

Adrianne Harun is the author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo, a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Catch, Release, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award. Stories from her collections have been listed as Notable in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. Her first novel A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Washington State Book Award and winner of a Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. A new novel, On the Way to the End of the World, was recently published. Adrianne studied Art History at Sarah Lawrence College and English Literature at Drew University and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

 A longtime resident of Port Townsend, Washington, Adrianne ran a garage, Motorsport, with her late husband, the legendary Alistair Scovil, and has also worked as a teacher and an editor for many years.

Mariana Johnson is associate professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she teaches courses in Latin American Cinema, History of Documentary, Hitchcock, and Film Theory, among other subjects. A former Fulbright Scholar, Johnson was awarded the Grand Marnier Film Fellowship from the Film Society of Lincoln Center and was a visiting scholar at the Instituto Riva-Aguero in Lima, Peru. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Film International, Film Comment, and The Oxford Handbook to Film Studies, among other publications. Mariana Johnson earned an MA and PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University, where she also earned a graduate certificate in ethnographic filmmaking from the Program for Media, Culture and History. She is currently editing the Directory of World Cinema: Cuba (Intellect Press) and working on a project about film preservation in Latin America.

 Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the short story collection Shit Cassandra Saw, which was released by Penguin in 2021. Claire Oshetsky of the New York Times described the collection as "stories [that] will defy all your expectations." Kirby's book was also featured on NPR's All Things Considered, and author Kevin Wilson said of the collection, "Kirby writes with boundless humor, confidence and ease, and yet there is always that flash of a fang." Kirby’s stories appear or are forthcoming in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her story “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” won the 2017 DISQUIET Literary Prize for Fiction. She has received two Pushcart Prize special mentions and has been awarded scholarships to the Rivendell Writers’ Colony and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She was the 2018-2019 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy. Kirby is teaching our Fall 2022 fiction workshop. She said of teaching, "I love discovering what obsessions and passions and questions my students have brought into the room and how I can help them bring those to life through fiction."

She hails from San Diego and is a proud graduate of Carleton College. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. For several years, she worked as the Associate Director of Programs and Finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. As of fall 2024, Kirby is teaching creative writing at her alma mater Carleton College.

Neil Shea is a veteran journalist whose work—published in such venues as The Providence Journal, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and The American Scholar—literally spans the globe, often covering military or environmental issues. Shea has been embedded with US troops in Iraq and interviewed a Taliban commander in Afghanistan; he has explored Mexico’s crystal cave, visited Madagascar’s remote stone forest, and reported on shrinking sea ice in the Arctic sea. An editor-at-large for the Virginia Quarterly Review and a writer for National Geographic, Shea has been honored with gold and silver Lowell Thomas Awards for stories on Ethiopia and Cuba, and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Overseas Press Club Award. Shea has taught courses in journalism and nonfiction writing at Boston University and at Furman University. Shea often posts dispatches on Instagram @neilshea13.

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting, which the New York Times named among the Top 10 Historical Fiction of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub. She lives in New Orleans, and recently served as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College. 

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.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s plays include Gee's Bend, Fresh Kills, The Flagmaker of Market Street, The Furniture of Home, White Lightning, and Provenance. Her plays have been produced at the Royal Court (London), Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center, Cleveland Play House, KC Rep, Northlight, the Arden, B Street Theatre, and Hartford Stage, among others. Most recently her play, Everything That’s Beautiful, premiered at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and her one act, “Santa Doesn’t Come to the Holiday Inn”was featured in the Marathon of One Act Plays at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Commissions and workshops include A Requiem for August Moon (Pioneer Theatre), The Bone Orchard (Denver Center, Great Plains Theatre Conference), and a short play for the acclaimed My America, Too project (Baltimore Center Stage), as well as four commissions from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. She is currently completing a new play, co-commissioned by the Sloan Foundation and the Geva Theatre, that explores racial bias and the development of color photography. Her play, The Light of the World, will be featured in the Southern Writers’ Festival at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in October. Most recently, Elyzabeth traveled with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on 10 day speaking and listening tour which explored the “State of the South” and the changing face of Southern identity. Elyzabeth is the recipient of the Osborn Award given by the American Theatre Critics Association and is a graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University.