Past Faculty

Daniel Anderson’s work has appeared in Poetry, 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 an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.

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.

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."

Ron Briggs is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College and teaches graduate seminars at Columbia University. A specialist in the literature and culture of Latin America, he has published essays and reviews in Studies in Travel Writing, Dieciocho, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and other scholarly journals. His first book, Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar: Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution, was published in 2010 by Vanderbilt University Press; his second book, The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910, was published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2017. Briggs graduated from Sewanee with a BA in English and Spanish. He earned an MA at Middlebury College and PhD at New York University.

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 edits 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction.

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 holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Tennessee State University 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. She is currently traveling under the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship.

Lee Conell is the author of the story collection Subcortical, which was awarded The Story Prize Spotlight Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and an American Fiction Award. Her short fiction appears in the Oxford American, Chicago Tribune, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Sewanee Review, Memorious, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She has received creative writing fellowships from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vanderbilt University, and the Yiddish Book Center. Her stories have been awarded the grand prize in the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Arts contest and cited in Best American Short Stories. Formerly the nonfiction editor for Nashville Review, Lee Conell regularly contributes reviews and interviews to Chapter 16, while her personal essays have appeared in The Millions, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. She has taught writing at Vanderbilt University, SUNY New Paltz, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital, and the Nashville Public Library.

Ann Jennalie Cook (1934 - 2017) is the author of The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576-1642, and Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society, both published by Princeton University Press. She has served as an officer of the International Shakespeare Association, on the Board of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and—from 1975 until 1987—as Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her work has been supported by fellowships from both the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. Recently, she was named a Life Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the only American to hold this honor. She taught for more than twenty years at Vanderbilt University.

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.

John Ernest has been identified as our most knowledgeable scholar of 19th-century African American literature, a judgment confirmed by the essays he has published in PMLA, American Literary History, and American Literature, among other journals, by the modern editions he has published of classic texts by William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft, and particularly by his books Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature and Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History. His most recent books are Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History and A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African American Communities before the Civil War. He is the editor of Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. John Ernest holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and taught at Florida International University, the University of New Hampshire, and West Virginia University, before taking up his current post as Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Delaware.

Angus Fletcher (1930 - 2016) was one of the most distinguished senior scholars of English and American literature. His best known book may be his classic study Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, but he has written on nearly everything: Spenser, Milton, the myth of Dionysus, and American poetry. Reviewing his most recent, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, Joan Richardson at bookforum.com praised him as "a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like," adding that his book was "not only a brilliant study of the early modern period but a handbook for our time as well, a meditation on the extended moment when the 'mind . . . discovers the psyche to be an integral part of the world out there.'" A long-time professor at the City University of New York, Fletcher also served as a visiting professor at Princeton and a Fellow at the Getty museum in Los Angeles.

Sidik Fofana is an author from New York. Fofana's novel Stories from our Tenants Downstairs is forthcoming from Scribner in the US and Hodder in the UK in 2021. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. 

Kathryn Freeman is a scholar of British Romanticism, Orientalism, Blake studies, and women’s literature. Her books include Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (SUNY 1997) and Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India (Ashgate 2014). She has published articles on Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary; Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta; and the translations of Williams Jones and Charles Wilkins. Her Guide to William Blake is a companion to Blake’s cosmology and historical context (Routledge 2017). Her current book project examines the literary relationship among Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley through the lens of androgyny, subjectivity, and the re-creative. She is also working on an edition of Phebe Gibbes’s 1786 novel, Zoriada, or Village Annals. Freeman received a PhD from Yale in 1990. She taught at Sewanee before moving to the University of Miami, where she is now professor of English.

John Gatta is William B. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of the South. His research and extensive writing—including five books and more than fifty articles—mainly concerns American literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the intersections of literature, religion, and the environment. His first book, a critical study of the New England poet Edward Taylor, won the 1989 Academic Book-of-the-Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and his second, American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture, was named an “outstanding academic book” for 1998 by editors of Choice. His third critical volume, like his second and fifth also from Oxford University Press, is Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. A graduate of Notre Dame, with a PhD from Cornell, Gatta has served as Chair of the English Department at the University of Connecticut, where he taught for many years before coming to Sewanee. He is currently Interim Director of the School of Letters, and he has previously served as Dean of the 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.

Holly Goddard Jones’s fiction has appeared in such journals as the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, and The Gettysburg Review and been anthologized in New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories. Her first book, the story collection Girl Trouble, was published by Harper Perennial in 2009, to enthusiastic acclaim from oracles as diverse as Erin McGraw and O Magazine. Her debut novel, The Next Time You See Me, was released in 2013. 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.

Recently Whichard Professor at East Carolina University, AGJ has also taught at Allegheny College, the University of Florida, and been visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. A well-known scholar of the literature of the American south, Professor Jones has published articles on William Faulkner, Allen Tate, Harriet Jacobs, and many others, and wrote one of the first and most important books on Southern women writers, Tomorrow's Another Day: The Woman Writer and the South, 1859-1936. A former president of the William Faulkner Society, she also co-edited Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. In 2007 she delivered the Lamar Memorial Lectures in Southern Culture at Mercer University.

Jessica Goudeau is the author of After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her next nonfiction book, We Were Illegal, will also be with Viking. 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. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas and served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and Interim Writing Center Director at Southwestern University. Goudeau has 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.

Adrianne Harun’s first collection of stories, The King of Limbo (Houghton Mifflin), was a Sewanee Writers' Series Selection and a Washington State Book Award finalist. Her novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in a Mountain (Viking/Penguin), won the Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction and was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award (PNBA) and has been longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin (IMPAC) Award. 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 on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, she has worked as an editor for many years and currently teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshops, an MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

David Huddle holds degrees from the University of Virginia, Hollins College, and Columbia University. Originally from Ivanhoe, Virginia, he taught for 38 years at the University of Vermont, then served three years as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University. He also held the 2012-2013 Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Huddle has continued to teach at the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont, and the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. Huddle’s work has appeared in The American Scholar, Esquire, Appalachian Heritage, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Shenandoah, Agni, Poetry, Story, and The Georgia Review. His novel, The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was named a Distinguished Book of the Year by Esquire and a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His novel, Nothing Can Make Me Do This, won the 2012 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction and his collection, Black Snake at the Family Reunion, was a finalist for the 2013 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry and won the 2013 Pen New England Award for Poetry.

Playwright Arlene Hutton is best known as the author of The Nibroc Trilogy, which includes Last Train to Nibroc (New York Drama League Best Play nomination), See Rock City (In the Spirit of America Award) and Gulf View Drive (LA Weekly and Ovation Award nominations). Other works include Running, Letters to Sala, The Three Sisters Brontë, and As It Is In Heaven. Her one-act play "I Dream Before I Take the Stand," a timely courtroom drama about sexual assault, has been revived on stages from California to London. Other recent productions were staged at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, B Street Theatre, Kitchen Theatre, Echo Theatre, Playhouse on Park, Florida Studio Theatre, Riverside and Chester Theatre, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. An alumna of New Dramatists and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and Dramatists Guild, Hutton has seen her work honored with the Macy’s New Play Prize, the Lippman Award, and the Calloway Award, along with residencies at the Australian National Playwrights Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She has taught playwriting at Fordham University, The College of Charleston, and (as Tennessee Williams Fellow) at the University of the South.

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.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a translator, poet, and teacher who has lived and worked in Iraq for the last six years. She served as the founding chair of the English Department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She received an MFA at Warren Wilson College and MEd from the University of Virginia. Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) introduced Kajal Ahmad’s poetry to English. The Dictionary of Midnight: Selected Poems of Abdulla Pashew is forthcoming from Phoneme Media in 2018. Poems, translations, and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Epiphany, Iowa Review, Words Without Borders, and the Poetry Society of America. She is currently co-director at AUIS’ Kashkul and a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Kurdish Studies.

Lawrence Lipking is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. A general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is also the author of four books, including The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author, and The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Christian Gauss Award for the Best Literary Study of 1982. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he also won the William Riley Parker Prize, given by the Modern Language Association, for best essay published in PMLA in 1996. At present he is engaged in a study of relations between science and the imagination during the Scientific Revolution.

A member of the Sewanee English department since 2013, Ross studies and teaches sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers, especially Milton, Jonson, and Spenser. His essays and reviews have appeared in Studies in Philology, Spenser Studies, Christianity and Literature, and most recently in Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2017). Ross was educated at Harvard and holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. He also taught high school and at Connecticut College before coming to the University of the South.

Pamela Royston Macfie is a professor of English at Sewanee, where she holds the Samuel R. Williamson Distinguished University Chair and teaches courses on Dante, Shakespeare, and Renaissance poetry. She has led the college’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Program and has served as chair of the English Department. A graduate of Goucher College, she received her MA and PhD degrees from Duke, where she was a Medieval and Renaissance Studies Fellow. Her published scholarship has covered Shakespeare, Spenser, Chapman, Marlowe and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets and focuses particularly on Renaissance appropriations of Ovid. These days she is preoccupied with a book-length project entitled “Summoning the Past: Hero and Leander’s Poetry of Allusion.” Her longstanding interest in Dante led her to Dartmouth’s Dante Seminar, where her participation was supported by the National Endowment of Humanities. Macfie has also served as a Wye Faculty Fellow at the Aspen Institute and as a tutor to British Studies at Oxford, a summer program operated jointly by Sewanee and Rhodes College.

Cheri Magid’s plays include The Ghost of Enoch Charlton, Manna, First Lady of Christmas, Playing Dog, et al; The Reluctant Dragon, Post Mortem, and Hot Chicken. They have been performed at Primary Stages, New Georges, The New Group, The Women’s Project, Rattlestick and The Lark, among others. She was a member of the Dorothy Strelsin Playwright Group at Primary Stages, was the Tennessee Williams Playwright in Residence at Sewanee in 2015-2016, a 2014 Audrey Resident at New Georges, and a 2014 Walter E Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her erotic story "She Grinds Her Own Coffee" was shot as a short film starring Raul Castillo (Looking) and screened at the New York Film Festival and the St. Louis International Film Festival. Lydia, or the Girl at the Wheel, her radio play about the earliest days of burlesque, aired on National Public Radio and her short story "Yeah, We Got That," was featured on Playboy Radio. She wrote the screenplay Story of D, about the real story behind the writing of the famous sadomasochistic novel Story of O, for Nicole Kidman and adapted the book Heart of the Game for film producer Richard Wiener (Any Given Sunday). Cheri Magid writes for the Emmy-award-winning children’s television show Arthur and is an assistant arts professor in dramatic writing at New York University.

Kelly Malone is a professor of English at Sewanee, and former Chair of the Department of English. She holds a BA from Providence College and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to teaching upper-level classes on Shakespeare and eighteenth-century British literature, she regularly teaches as part of the Early Modern team in Sewanee’s interdisciplinary Humanities program. With Elizabeth Mansfield, she co-edited Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, published by the Voltaire Foundation of the Oxford University Press in 2013. She is a reviewer for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Her research and writing focus on the literary and cultural history of Restoration and Augustan England.

Charles Martin is equally accomplished as an original poet and as a student and translator of Latin verse. His works in the former category include Room for Error (1978), Steal the Bacon (1987), and What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and in the latter, both a translation of The Poems of Catullus (1995) and a critical study of that poet. In 2002, his Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002) was a finalist for the Lemore Marshall Prize from the American Academy of Poets, and in 2004 his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses won that organization's Harold Morton Landon Award for translation. In 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the coveted Award for Literature. His most recent books are Signs & Wonders, a new collection of poems, and a collaborative translation (with Gavin Flood) of the Bhagavad Gita. Charles Martin received his degrees from Fordham and the SUNY at Buffalo and has taught at the City University of New York and Syracuse University.

Christopher M. McDonough is a professor of classical languages at the University of the South, where he has chaired both the Classics Department and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. Before coming to Sewanee in 2002, he taught at Boston College, Princeton University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He co-authored an annotated translation of Serevius' Commentary on Aeneid Book Four, published in 2003. His scholarly articles have appeared in American Journal of Philology, Mnemosyne, Classical Quarterly, and other journals, and his book reviews in The Weekly Standard and the Sewanee Review. His innovative teaching of the classics has been profiled in The Boston Globe and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Chris McDonough received a BA from Tufts University and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find Chris' musings—classical and not-so-classical—at http://uncomelyandbroken.wordpress.com/.

Karen McElmurray is the author of two published novels (Motel of the Stars and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven), a forthcoming novel (Wanting Inez), and many short stories and personal essays (published in journals like Kenyon Review, Old Dominion Review, Atlanta Magazine, and Alaska Quarterly Review). But she is best known for her stunning 2004 memoir The Surrendered Child, which concerns her experience as a pregnant teen deciding to offer her son for adoption. The book was a Glasgow Prize finalist, an Appalachian Writers Association Award nominee, and a “Notable Book,” so named by the National Book Critics Circle; McElmurray herself was named Georgia Writer of the Year in 2005. Holding degrees from Berea College, the University of Virginia, and the University of Georgia, she has taught at Virginia Tech, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and many other institutions, most recently Georgia College, where she is an associate professor of English.

Erin McGraw is the author of five books of fiction, including the story-collections Lies of the Saints (A New York Times Notable Book for 1996), The Baby Tree, The Good Life, and, most recently, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard. McGraw taught creative writing at Ohio State University. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, STORY, and elsewhere. Her work has been honored with the Pushcart Prize and fellowships at the McDowell and Yaddo writers' colonies. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught at DePauw University and the University of Cincinnati, where she received the Boyce Award for Excellence in Teaching.

A graduate of Sewanee, Sam Pickering did graduate work at Cambridge and Princeton before embarking on a remarkable academic and literary career. Among his twenty books are several works of literary history (e.g., The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850), a couple of travel memoirs (Walkabout Year, Edinburgh Days), and (at last count) fifteen volumes of the familiar essays for which he is best known. Among these are A Continuing Education, The Right Distance, Still Life, Deprived of Unhappiness, and Indian Summer. He is equally well-known as a teacher who has inspired students at the Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, at Dartmouth College, and—for thirty years—at the University of Connecticut. He has written a book of advice for teachers (Letters to a Teacher) and is widely recognized as the teacher who inspired the 1989 film Dead Poets’ Society.

Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon, published in 2018 with Grove Press (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and House of Anansi (Canada). Selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice. Quatro's story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, the Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

Quatro’s books are published in translation in Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands. A contributing editor at Oxford American, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Recent essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Oxford American, and as part of the Greenpeace Climate Visionaries series. Her stories are anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The Story and Its Writer, and the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is a recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Mark Rasmussen is the Charles J. Luellen Professor of English at Centre College, where he has been teaching courses on Medieval and Renaissance literature since 1989. His recent publications include “Shakespeare and the Critics: Rhetoric, Form, Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (2016), as well as a critical introduction, “Jill Mann’s Patience,” to Life in Words (2014), the collected essays of the distinguished medievalist Jill Mann, a volume that he edited. Rasmussen’s other edited collection, Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), has had a lasting impact within its field, renewing attention to questions of form in English Renaissance literature. A graduate of Harvard, Rasmussen received his PhD at Johns Hopkins, where he also taught before taking up his post at Centre. There he has received the Kirk Award for Teaching Excellence among many other honors. At the School of Letters he has offered courses on Chaucer, on the Arthurian legend, and on literary criticism and theory.

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.

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. 

Elizabeth A. Skomp is Professor of Russian and Associate Dean at the University of the South, where she teaches courses in language, literature, and film. After earning her BA at Indiana University and winning a Marshall Scholarship, she earned a PhD from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College, London. The author of many essays, reviews and translations, she is also the editor of Harmony and Discord: Moving towards a New Europe, published in 2003. She is now at work on a study of motherhood in Russian literature. Prior to coming to Sewanee, Professor Skomp taught at Williams College, DePauw University, and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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.

Diane Thiel is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy, including Echolocations (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize), Resistance Fantasies, The White Horse: A Colombian Journey, Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres, and Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction. Her translation of Alexis Stamatis's novel American Fugue received a National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Award. Thiel’s work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, The Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, is reprinted in over 50 major anthologies, and has been translated widely. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a Fulbright Scholar, she is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico and has served as Writer-in-Residence for the Environmental Institute at Sewanee. To learn more visit: www.dianethiel.net.

Lauryl Tucker is an associate professor of English at the University of the South, where she teaches classes on modern literature. Her scholarly interests range from Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot to C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers; her essays have appeared in such journals as Literature Interpretation Theory, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Sewanee Theological Review. At present she is hard at work on a book about humor and gender in the work of such poets as Louise Bennett, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy. A graduate of Sewanee, Lauryl Tucker earned her MA and PhD at the University of Virginia.

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.