School of Letters Reading

Author Richard Tillinghast will be the Sewanee School of Letters reader at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 19, in Gailor Auditorium. A reception will follow the reading. The reading is sponsored by the School of  Letters and Friends of the Library.
Tillinghast is the author of 10 books of poetry and three non-fiction books. His most recent books of poetry are “The New Life, 2008, Sewanee Poems” (with lithographs by Joseph Winkelman) and “Selected Poems,”  as well as “Dirty August,” translations from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, in collaboration with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast. For their Cansever translations, the father-daughter team received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2008 Richard also published “Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture,” winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for Best Travel Essays. He has received grants from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Irish Arts Council, the British Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, was awarded an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship from Harvard, and was a 2010–11 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Tillinghast has also been awarded the James Dickey Prize for poetry and the Cleanth Brooks Prize for creative nonfiction. He is currently finishing a travel book, “Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering,” which will be published in the UK in November.
A native of Memphis, Richard graduated from Sewanee in 1962 and went on to get his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. He taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan until his retirement in 2005, a teaching career that included a visiting professorship at Sewanee in 1979–80. In 2008 he was given a honorary D.Litt. degree by his alma mater, and read part of his long poem, “Sewanee When We Were Young,” at the Commencement service that year. He lived in Ireland for five years, but has recently returned to this country and has bought a house in Sewanee, where he plans to spend part of the year.