McDermott Opens 24th Sewanee Writers’ Conference

Celebrating its 24th summer session, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference will run from Tuesday, July 23, through Saturday, Aug. 3, and feature readings, panels and lectures by distinguished faculty and nationally recognized editors, publishers and literary agents.

The conference will begin with a reading by fiction writer Alice McDermott at 8:15 p.m., Tuesday, July 23. All readings and lectures are free, open to the public and held on campus in the Mary Sue Cushman Room of the Bairnwick Women’s Center. 

McDermott is the author of six novels—”A Bigamist’s Daughter,” “That Night,” “At Weddings and Wakes,” “Charming Billy,” “Child of My Heart” and “After This.” She received the National Book Award in 1998 for “Charming Billy.” Her articles, reviews and stories have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, USA Today, Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Commonweal and the Washington Post. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Corrington Award for Literature, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, she is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. 

The following eleven days will feature a variety of lectures and events. A complete Conference schedule can be found on page 7, or online at <www.sewaneewriters.org/confer​ence/schedule>. Authors’ books are available at the University Book & Supply Store.

The conference will include readings by National Book Award and 2013 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award Winner for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing Tim O’Brien, Pulitzer Prize-winner Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer Prize-winners and former Poets Laureate of the United States Robert Hass and Mark Strand, 2012 Rea Award Winner for the Short Story Richard Bausch, Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award Winner Diane Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Christine Schutt and PEN/Malamud Award Winner for Short Fiction Elizabeth Spencer. Additional readings will feature award-winning poets Daniel Anderson, Andrew Hudgins, Maurice Manning, Conference Director Wyatt Prunty, Mary Jo Salter, A.E. Stallings, Sidney Wade, Caki Wilkinson, best-selling and critically acclaimed fiction writers Tony Earley, Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Erin McGraw, Steve Yarbrough, and esteemed playwrights Daisy Foote and Dan O’Brien. 

Editors from Algonquin Books, the American Scholar, Blackbird, Grove/Atlantic, the Hopkins Review, the Kenyon Review, Knopf, the Missouri Review, New Directions, Northwestern University Press, the Oxford American, Penguin, Poetry, and the Weekly Standard will discuss publishing. 

Supported by the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund established through the estate of the late Tennessee Williams, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference offers instruction and criticism to writers through a series of workshops, readings and craft lectures in poetry, fiction and playwriting. Lectures and readings will be in the Mary Sue Cushman Room of the Bairnwick Women’s Center on Mississippi Avenue, one block south of University Avenue. Admission to all public events is free, but space may be limited.

For more information, call 598-1654 or visit the Sewanee Writers’ Conference website at <sewaneewriters.org>.