Sewanee Event Highlights

July 3 at 4:30 p.m.
Gailor Hall

Justin Taylor's latest novel, Reboot, was published in April. A review by author Joshua Ferris made the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where he called Reboot a “performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics." Taylor directs the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. 

Emily Adrian is the author of the novels Everything Here Is Under Control and The Second Season, a novel about a former women’s college basketball star who becomes the first female NBA announcer, which Kareem Abdul-Jabaar called “riveting, insightful, and touching.” Her memoir, Daughterhood, will be published by Autofocus Press in 2024. Adrian has joined the School of Letters for her first summer, teaching a nonfiction workshop.

July 5 at 7:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

The Cumberland Orchestra is a pre-professional symphony orchestra for advanced pre-college and college students. Led by gifted educators and supported by the Sewanee Summer Music Festival's dedicated faculty, the Cumberland Orchestra offers these participants the opportunity to learn and grow as orchestral performers, exploring significant literature from the symphonic canon as well as contemporary works. Musical selections for this Friday include: Louise Farrenc—Overture #1; Dvorak—Serenade for winds; Ottorino Respighi—Pini di Roma.

July 6 at 7:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

Arthur Foote—At Dusk

Sergei Prokofiev—Overture on Hebrew Themes

Christopher Farrell—Trio for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass

Franz Schubert—Piano Trio in E-flat major

June 30 at 3:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

The Sewanee Symphony is a pre-professional ensemble of college and select pre-college students that will study core literature, explore contemporary works, and collaborate with faculty soloists. Festival faculty will guide weekly sectionals and attend rehearsals to reinforce fundamentals of orchestral performance. This Sunday's music includes: Gabriela Lena Frank—Escaramuza, and Dimitri Shostakovich—Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47.

June 29 at 7:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

Igor Stravinsky—Pastorale for Violin and Wind Quartet

Gabriel Faure—Piano Quartet No. 1 C minor

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—Horn Quintet in Eb Major, K 407

Ludwig v. Beethoven—Quartet in F Major, Op. 18 No. 1

June 28 at 7:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

The Cumberland Orchestra is a pre-professional symphony orchestra for advanced pre-college and college students. Led by gifted educators and supported by our dedicated faculty, the Cumberland Orchestra offers these participants the opportunity to learn and grow as orchestral performers, exploring significant literature from the symphonic canon as well as contemporary works. Musical selections this Friday include: Higdon—Machine; Faure—Pavane; Saint Saens—Samson et Delila: Bacchanale; Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov—Capriccio Espagnol, Op. 34.

June 26 at 6 p.m.
St. Luke's Chapel

STARTALK—Sewanee Chinese Language Camp, and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival are excited to host Wu Fei, a classically trained composer, singer, and master of the guzheng, the 21-string Chinese zither. She has performed around the world at venues including New York’s MoMA, Paris’ Quai Branly Museum, and the North Sea Jazz Festival.

She plays in the guzheng’s vernacular—a musical language at least 2,500 years old – mixing Western classical and Chinese traditions with a contemporary, idiosyncratic sound.

June 26 at 4:30 p.m.
Gailor Hall

Tiana Clark's next poetry collection, Scorched Earth, will be published in March of next year. Clark is currently working on, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival. 

Ryan Chapman's newest novel, The Audacity, was released in April of this year. Vanity Fair called it a “delicious satire,” and fellow author Kevin Nguyen described the novel as “a satire that hits on the line level, sparing none of its characters or observation from its skewering wit.” 

Jamie Quatro’s next novel, Two-Step Devil, will be published by Grove Press in September, followed by her story collection, Next Time I’ll Be Louder, in 2025. Her debut novel, Fire Sermon, was 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.

June 23 at 3:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

The Sewanee Symphony is a pre-professional ensemble of college and select pre-college students that will study core literature, explore contemporary works, and collaborate with faculty soloists. Festival faculty will guide weekly sectionals and attend rehearsals to reinforce fundamentals of orchestral performance. This Sunday's music includes: Johannes Brahms—Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80; Richard Strauss—Der Rosenkavalier Suite; J. Strauss—Radetzky March; Brahms—Hungarian Dance No. 5; J. Strauss II—Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka.

June 23 at 7:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

Toru Takemitsu—Between Tides

Edward Gregson—Quintet for Brass

Alyssa Morris—Mathematics

Sergei Prokofiev—Quintet in G minor, op. 39

June 21 at 4:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

The Cumberland Orchestra is a pre-professional symphony orchestra for advanced pre-college and college students. Led by gifted educators and supported by our dedicated faculty, the Cumberland Orchestra offers these participants the opportunity to learn and grow as orchestral performers, exploring significant literature from the symphonic cannon as well as contemporary works. Musical selections this Friday include: Strauss—Die Fledermaus Overture, Nkeiru Okoye—Voices Shouting Out, and Edvard Grieg—Peer Gynt Suite No.1, Op.46.

June 20 at 5:30 p.m.
Sewanee Inn

Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having published her first two novels on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, The New York Times Book Review said: “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist. With July 7th, she is also a full grown one.” Since then she has published five other novels—most recently published is Hieroglyphics (2020, Algonquin Books)—and five collections of short stories (Old Crimes, 2024). Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books, and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories.

June 19 at 4:30 p.m.
Naylor Auditorium

Nickole Brown's book Fanny Says won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a book of nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize. Her essay-in-poems, the Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She's also a fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is the president of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, North Carolina in October 2025. Lindsey Harding, L'11, directs the Writing Intesive Program at the University of Georgia where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 2015. Her novel Pilgrims 2.0 follows four passengers on a luxury cruise line that promises complete reinvention through plastic surgery.

June 16 at 3:30 p.m.
Guerry Auditorium

Adrien Barthe: Passacaille

Jessie Montgomery: Duo for Violin and Cello

Jorge Variego: Fuego y Duende

Edmund Rubbra: Sonata in C for Oboe and Piano, Op. 100

Sergei Rachmanioff: Two Etudes - Tableaux 

Ivan Trevino: Wildings

Maurice Ravel: Pièce en forme de habanera

Kevin McKee: Vuelta del Fuego

June 12 at 4:30 p.m.
Naylor Auditorium

Tracy O’Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful, and Quotients, a “stunning, and deeply disquieting, literary techno-thriller”. “O’Neill’s sentences are expertly crafted marvels of economy. Her prose almost feels redacted, as if someone has cut out just the right bits to keep you guessing and thinking and feeling,” says Charles Yu. Her memoir, Woman of Interest is “a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.” The former editor-in-chief of Epiphany journal, her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications. She is an assistant professor at Vassar College.

June 12 at 7 p.m.
Convocation Hall

Dr. Hannah Matis, associate professor of Church History, will deliver a lecture entitled, “Daring the Wilderness: The Preaching and Theology of the Beguines.” In her lecture Matis will illuminate the religious lives of this diverse group of lay religious women who lived in the high and late Middle Ages. Beguines included some of the most innovative and radical vernacular theologians of their day and influenced other theologians and forms of religious life on the eve of the Reformation. 

June 5 at 4:30 p.m.
Naylor Auditorium

Adam O’Fallon Price is the author of two novels, The Grand Tour and The Hotel Neversink, which won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. Meera Subramanian is an award-winning independent journalist whose book A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka was short-listed for the 2016 Orion Book Award. 

June 3 at 5:30 p.m.
The Sewanee Village Bookstore

Ryan Chapman’s latest novel, The Audacity, was released April 2 and has been described as “a bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaire's philanthropy summit.’’ School of Letters Director Justin Taylor’s new book, Reboot, “a raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture,’’ was released on April 23. 

May 11 at 7 p.m.
McGriff Alumni House tent

The Associated Alumni invites you to a Commencement Celebration Party honoring the Class of 2024. Live music by The Answer Band and celebration fireworks at 9 p.m.! Come celebrate with families, students, and faculty members at this popular tradition.

May 6 at 5 p.m.
St. Luke's Chapel

Come listen to senior vocalist and baritone Gabriel Rice, for Der Friede sei mit dir. A culmination of voice studies, the program presents a diverse collection of works exploring the genres of opera, oratorio, and art song. With Dr. Kenneth Miller, piano and organ, and the Schola Cantorum of the School of Theology. Featuring Sonny Bowers, violin, and Ellanna Swope, voice.

May 3 at 2 p.m.
duPont Library, Main Lobby

Library Information and Technology Services is providing coffee along with sweet treats, savory snacks, and fruit to get you through your finals!

May 2 at 9 a.m.
Gray Terrace, Biehl Commons

Please join us in celebrating the Class of 2024! The Dean of the College
and the Dean of Students want to celebrate graduating seniors. Enjoy some light refreshments with senior students, faculty, and staff!