June 18 at the Sewanee Inn
Tickets are $150 per person for dinner and cocktails at the Sewanee Inn. Tables are $1500 each for 8 guests including yourself. All other events during the week are free.
Join us to celebrate 20 Years of the Sewanee School of Letters!
Come to Sewanee this summer to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the School of Letters! Reconnect with friends, faculty, students, and alumni of the MA and MFA programs for readings and seminars, and for a celebratory dinner on Thursday, June 18 at the Sewanee Inn. Ticket information for the dinner is below. We are thrilled to announce that our keynote speaker will be two-term Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey.
DINNER SCHEDULE JUNE 18
At the Sewanee Inn. Ticket info is below.
5:30 pm Books and Bubbly Enjoy cocktails, book sales and photos.
7:00 pm Dinner and Remarks
ADDITIONAL EVENTS
Wednesday, June 17, at 2:00 pm, Alumni Book Signing with Donna Mintz, L'17, University Bookstore. Mintz is the author of Stars at Noon (2026). Weaving essay, memoir, and natural history with biography, Stars at Noon is one artist's pilgrimage through a book and a love letter to its author, James Agee, whose untimely death becomes the thread connecting it all.
Wednesday, June 17, Reading and Conversation with Eliana Ramage at 4:30 pm As part of our Summer Reading Series, novelist Eliana Ramage will read from her debut Reese's Pick novel, To the Moon and Back. If you were spellbound by the recent Artemis II mission, this book is for you! Details here. Free and open to the public.
Thursday, June 18, The School of Letters 20th Anniversary Faculty Seminars Starting in Gailor, there will be coffee and donuts outside Naylor Auditorium. At 10:00 am Adam O'Fallon Price will open with a craft lecture, and at 11:00 am Dr. Pamela Macfie will read and discuss her life in Letters, Shakespeare, and memoir. At Noon, grab your own lunch at Stirling's Coffeehouse and meet Jamie Quatro for a generative writing session. Open to students and alumni.
Saturday, June 20, 10:00 am to 2:00 pm, Social Lodge, Mindfulness for Writers with Elizabeth Watkins Price, C'02 Open for students and alumni. Learn mindfulness practices tailored to support a writer's life. Alumni, please rsvp with Will Pugh. Lunch included.
ABOUT NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In addition to her poetry, Trethewey is the author of two memoirs The House of Being (2024) and Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. At Sewanee, she has been the Haines Lecturer and an honorary degree recipient.
