Bonnie Bishop to Perform at Angel Park

At 7:30 p.m., today (Friday), June 10, at Angel Park, Thirty Tigers recording artist and Grammy-winning songwriter Bonnie Bishop will perform. A veteran touring musician with five records behind her, Bishop has seen her songs covered by Bonnie Raitt and performed on the TV show Nashville. Her sixth album, “Ain’t Who I Was,” appeared on May 27 to remarkable acclaim, including strong reviews from the New York Times, Rolling Stone and American Songwriter. The Texas native’s roots are in Country music, but the current record—produced by Dave Cobb, fresh from albums with Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell—moves toward R&B and draws persistent comparisons to Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis. The Sewanee show, interrupting a very busy tour, will be a homecoming for Bishop, who is a creative writing student in the Sewanee School of Letters. The School of Letters is sponsoring the event, which is free and open to all.

“sometimes there’s God so quickly” at McCrory Hall

Actor and author David Roby plays 19 different characters in this one-man tour de force. The play will be at 7 p.m., Saturday, June 18, at the McCrory Hall for the Performing Arts on the campus of St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School. Sponsored by the Sewanee School of Letters, this event is free and open to the public.
“sometimes there’s God so quickly” is a chronicle of Roby’s travels through the Mississippi Delta, a quest for the elusive character of the late playwright Tennessee Williams, presented through a colloquy of the voices of those who knew him. The event is free and open to the public.
Roby was the Tennessee Williams Fellow at Sewanee from 2010 to 2012 (when he researched and wrote this one-man show) and is now Artist-in-Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Arts in Medicine and an acting and playwriting teacher at U.A.B.’s ArtPlay.
A graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and holding an M.F.A. degree from Illinois State University, he has also studied acting and playwriting at Oxford University, the Wooly Mammoth Theatre School in Washington, D.C. and the Playwright’s Intensive at the John F. Kennedy Center. His other plays include “Arts and Science,” “Unseen Character”(which concerns characters referred to but not seen in Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”) and “Mercy Me.”

Bonnie Bishop to Perform

At 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 10, at Angel Park, Thirty Tigers recording artist and Grammy-winning songwriter Bonnie Bishop will perform. A veteran touring musician with five records behind her, Bishop has seen her songs covered by Bonnie Raitt and performed on the tv show Nashville. Her sixth album, Ain’t Who I Was, appeared on May 27 to remarkable acclaim, including strong reviews from the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and American Songwriter. The Texas native’s roots are in Country music, but the current record—produced by Dave Cobb, fresh from albums with Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell—moves toward R&B and draws persistent comparisons to Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis. The Sewanee show, interrupting a very busy tour, will be a homecoming for Bishop, who is a creative writing student in the Sewanee School of Letters. The School of Letters is sponsoring the event, which is free and open to all.

School of Letters Public Events

Each summer the School of Letters invites writers, poets, publishers and scholars to speak each week that school is in session. These events are free and open to the public.
At 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 8, author Ed Tarkington will give a reading in the Gailor Auditorium. This is sponsored by the School of Letters and the Friends of the Library.
Tarkington is the author of the novel “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” published this year by Algonquin. The book has won remarkable acclaim, particularly for a first novel: it was both an Indie Next pick for the American Booksellers Association and an Indies Introduce pick for IndieBound, and Book of the Month Club made it a Main Selection.
Tarkington is a graduate of Furman University and earned graduate degrees at the University of Virginia and Florida State. A frequent contributor to <Chapter16.org>, his articles, essays and stories have appeared in the Nashville Scene, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Post Road, the Pittsburgh Quarterly, the Southeast Review and elsewhere. He lives in Nashville, where he teaches English and coaches wrestling at Montgomery Bell Academy.
A reception and book signing will follow the reading in Gailor Atrium.
On Wednesday, June 15, at 4:30 p.m., in Gailor Auditorium, Jennifer Habel will present the reading. She is the author of “Good Reason,” winner of the Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, and “In the Little House,” winner of the Copperdome Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, LIT, The Massachusetts Review, The Southeast Review and elsewhere. In 2014 she won an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Habel is currently the coordinator of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. A reception and book signing will follow in Gailor Atrium.
Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels “The Throwback Special,” “Abbott Awaits,” “U.S.!,” “Bear v. Shark” and “Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography.” He will give the reading at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 22, in Gailor Auditorium. His short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of magazines and journals including The Paris Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The 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 new novel, “The Throwback Special,” was serialized in The Paris Review. The book follows 22 men who meet each year to reenact the 1985 Joe Theisman football injury. Bachelder was awarded the prestigious Terry Southern prize this year. 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. A book signing will follow in Gailor Atrium.
“What Was the New Journalism? A Dialogue with John Grammer and Neil Shea” will be at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 29, in Gailor Auditorium with a reception following in Gailor Atrium.
Marshall Frady called it an “odd unchurched coupling between the novel and journalism.” Tom Wolfe gave it the name that stuck, “the New Journalism,” a designation John Sullivan glosses like this: “the long, weird, quasi-essayistic, documentary-infused magazine piece, a form older than the novel, despite a heritable instinct in critics to continually be calling it New.” New or old, the form experienced a remarkable flowering in the 1960s and early 1970s, when writers like Frady and Wolfe—and Mailer and Talese and King and Morris—created a remarkable moment in American letters, one that continues to inspire writers like Sullivan. Grammer and Shea discuss the moment and its influence on nonfiction writing today.
Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of two books, most recently the novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” (St. Martin’s Press). Her story collection, “How to Leave Hialeah,” won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Book Prize and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald, the Miami New Times and the Latinidad List. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Ploughshares, Epoch, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner and other magazines. She’s the fiction editor of PEN Center USA’s Handbook for Writers, a comprehensive writing manual used in high schools nationally as part of PEN’s Writers in the Schools programs. A former sketch comedienne and National Public Radio scriptwriter, she’s worked extensively as a writing coach and college advisor for high school students and also led the Young Artists’ Workshop (exclusively for high school writers) at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference for three years. A winner of an O. Henry Prize and a Bread Loaf Fellow, she received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, where she was also an instructor. She grew up in Miami but now lives in Lincoln, Neb., where she’s an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska. This reading will be at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 6, in Gailor Auditorium with a reception and book signing following in Gailor Atrium.
On Wednesday, July 13, at 4:30 p.m., in Gailor Auditorium, the School of Letters MFA candidates will read from their work.
For the complete schedule go to< www.letters.sewanee.edu/readings/>.

Sewanee Graduation Events Begin Today

The University of the South’s 2014–15 academic year comes to a close today through Sunday, May 8–10, with three ceremonies marking graduation weekend at Sewanee. Commencement and Baccalaureate ceremonies will be held for students from the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Theology and the School of Letters.

Commencement for conferring of degrees for the 35 graduates of the School of Theology will be in All Saints’ Chapel on Friday, May 8.

The Baccalaureate service will be at 10 a.m., Saturday, May 9, in All Saints’ Chapel; it will also be shown on closed-circuit TV in Guerry Auditorium. Robert M. Gates, former secretary of defense and former president of Texas A&M University, will give the address. 

Commencement ceremonies for the College and the School of Letters will be at 10 a.m., Sunday, May 10, in All Saints’ Chapel. Tickets are required for seating in All Saints’ Chapel and McClurg Hall; tickets are not required to watch the ceremonies on closed-circuit TV in Guerry Auditorium. 

Approximately 350 students are expected to graduate from the College, and nine from the School of Letters. A luncheon honoring the Class of 2015 graduates will follow. 

All three services will be streamed live on the University’s website for those unable to attend.

Honorary degrees will be presented to the Rt. Rev. Robert Skirving, bishop of the Diocese of East Carolina, and to the Most Rev. Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who will also preach during the May 8 School of Theology Commencement service.

In addition to Gates, Mary Moore Dwyer, president and CEO of Institute for the International Education of Students; F. Robertson Hershey, headmaster of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va.; and Jefferson Allen McMahan, C’76, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, will receive honorary degrees during the May 9 Baccalaureate ceremony. 

University 2015 Commencement Weekend Events Set

The University’s 2014–15 academic year comes to a close May 8–10 with three ceremonies marking graduation weekend on the Mountain. Commencement and Baccalaureate ceremonies will be held for students from the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Letters and the School of Theology. Two honorary degrees will be presented during the School of Theology Commencement and four, during the Baccalaureate ceremony.

Honorary degrees will be presented to the Rt. Rev. Robert Skirving, bishop of the Diocese of East Carolina, and to the Most Rev. Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who will also preach during the May 8 School of Theology Commencement service.

Robert M. Gates, former secretary of defense and former president of Texas A&M University; Mary Moore Dwyer, president and CEO of IES Abroad (Institute for the International Education of Students); F. Robertson Hershey, headmaster of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va.; and Jefferson Allen McMahan, C’76, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, will receive honorary degrees during the May 9 Baccalaureate ceremony. Gates will give the Baccalaureate address during the service.

On Sunday, May 10, a Convocation for Conferring of Degrees will be at 10 a.m. in All Saints’ Chapel (tickets required) for the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Letters. A luncheon honoring the Class of 2015 graduates will follow.

All three services will be streamed live on the university’s website for those unable to attend.

Mary M. Dwyer is president and CEO of IES Abroad, the Institute for the International Education of Students, one of the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit study abroad program providers, offering more than 125 programs around the world. She was the lead researcher on a 50-year longitudinal impact study to measure the effect of study abroad on student’s academic careers, personal growth, careers, and language and intercultural development. She is active in efforts to advance international education policy and practice and is a frequent speaker in the field, including topics such as study abroad trends, outcomes assessment and evaluation systems. Prior to joining IES, Dwyer was a faculty member in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a bachelor of arts from Mundelein College, a master’s degree in educational leadership and a doctorate in public policy analysis from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Robert M. Gates served as the U.S. secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011. Before becoming secretary of defense, Gates was the president of Texas A&M University (2002–06). Gates spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence professional with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was deputy national security adviser for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1991, and served as director of Central Intelligence from 1991 until 1993. In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. Gates received a bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary, a master’s degree from Indiana University, and a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University. He was installed as chancellor of the College of William & Mary in 2012.

F. Robertson “Rob” Hershey is the 11th headmaster of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., serving in that role since 1998. Hershey began his independent school career at Woodberry Forest School, where he taught history and economics; he later served in many other roles, including assistant headmaster and associate headmaster. Hershey has led several campus renewal projects at Episcopal. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and a master’s of education from the University of Virginia.

Jefferson Allen McMahan, C’76, is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. McMahan has written and lectured extensively on the metaphysics of death and the ethics of killing. A significant portion of his work is dedicated to the re-examination and revision of traditional just war theory using contemporary ethical theory. McMahan earned a bachelor of arts in English at Sewanee and then did graduate work in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He received a doctorate in 1986. He was previously on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Rutgers University. His publications include “The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life,” “Killing in War” and “The Morality of Nationalism” and “Ethics and Humanity.”

Panel Talks About the Percys at Brinkwood

Sewanee School of Letters and Rivendell Writers’ Colony will present a panel discussion, “The Percys at Brinkwood and Beyond,” at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 29, in Gailor Auditorium. 

The panel will be led by Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss. On the panel will be John Grammer, director of the Sewanee School of Letters; Wyatt Prunty, director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; and Billy Percy, nephew of Walker Percy.

“We’re truly fortunate to have such an accomplished panel of Percy scholars and experts. Rivendell is proud to sponsor events which highlight the history and literary accomplishments of the Percy family,” said Carmen Thompson, director of Rivendell Writers’ Colony. 

Rivendell Writers’ Colony adjoins the historical Brinkwood property once owned by William Alexander Percy, and later his novelist cousin, Walker Percy.

“Brinkwood, Sewanee and Lost Cove played fairly small parts in the lives of William Alexander Percy and his cousin, Walker, but large parts in both their imaginations,” said Grammer. “Why was this? The panel should be a great chance to shed light on the question.” For more information go to <www.rivendellwriterscolony.org> or <letters.sewanee.edu/readings>.

Editors Discuss Nonfiction

The Sewanee School of Letters is hosting “Stranger Than Fiction: Editor Panel on Nonfiction Writing,” at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 9, in Gailor Audi torium. A reception will follow.

National Geographic writer and Virginia Quarterly Review contributing editor Neil Shea will lead a conversation on nonfiction publishing with editors Paul Reyes of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Leigh Anne Couch of the Sewanee Review and Bruce Falconer of the American Scholar.

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 U.S. 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. He has won 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.

Couch is the managing editor of the Sewanee Review. Her poems have appeared in the Western Hu- manities Review, Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Gulf Coast Review, Cincinnati Review,Carolina Quarterly and other journals. Her chapbook, “Green and Helpless,” was published by Finishing Line Press, and her first book, “Houses Fly Away,” was winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award. She lives in Sewanee with the writer Kevin Wilson and their sons, Griff and Patch.

Reyes is the deputy editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) and is the author of “Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession” (2010). “Opportunity Knocks,” his essay about the Miami organization Take Back the Land published in the Fall 2009 issue of VQR, was a finalist for a Harry Chapin Media Award. Another essay about the housing crisis in Florida was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He is married to photographer and designer Ellen Reyes.

Falconer is the senior editor of the American Scholar, a national, general- interest magazine based in Washing- ton, D.C., where he assigns and edits nonfiction features and book reviews. He was previously a staff writer at Mother Jones and, for six years, an editor at the Atlantic. At the Scholar, he has worked with a broad range of accomplished writers.

As a writer, his work has taken him around the world—to Switzerland, where he wrote about the phenomenon of “suicide tourism”; to the re- mote Canadian archipelago of Haida Gwaii, site of the largest and most controversial “geoengineering” experiment in history; and to Chile, where he pieced together the story of Colonia Dignidad, a German religious commune that, in the 1970s, tortured and murdered political dissidents for Augusto Pinochet. 

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.

Campus Summer Programs Set to Open

Both the Sewanee School of Letters and the College summer session begin in the coming days: the School of Letters on June 9 and the summer session of the College on June 10. Together, the programs will bring almost 130 students to campus for the next six weeks.

The Sewanee School of Letters is a graduate program offering master’s degrees in literature, creative writing, and theology and literature. Students typically attend for four or five summer terms to earn an M.A. or an M.F.A. degree. Fifty-six students are expected to be in Sewanee for the School of Letters this year, learning from 10 faculty members.

The summer session of the College offers an opportunity for students to take special courses not normally available, helps students gain additional credits toward degree completion and provides incoming freshmen a chance to adapt to the academic demands of college. Seventy-one students are enrolled in the summer session; classes meet Monday through Friday.

Another wave of summer programs will begin in two weeks, with the openings of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival (June 22), and the Bridge Program in Math and Science and first session of the Sewanee Summer Seminar (both June 23).

Hudgins Reading Wednesday

Author Andrew Hudgins will open this year’s Sewanee School of Letters readings at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 12, in Gailor Auditorium. A reception will follow the reading.

Hudgins will publish two new books this month. “A Clown at Midnight” is his ninth collection of poems. “The Joker” is a memoir of his career as an appreciator of, thinker about, and irrepressible teller of jokes. Hudgins’s eight previous books of poetry include “Saints and Strangers” (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), “After the Lost War” (winner of the Poets’ Prize), “The Never-Ending” (finalist for the National Book Award), “Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children” and “American Rendering: New and Selected Poems.” 

He is also the author of two collections of literary essays, “The Glass Anvil” and “Diary of a Poem.” His work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and Princeton’s Arthur C. Hodder Fellowship, and honored by prizes from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Hudgins is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He has often served on the faculties of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee School of Letters.