Whatever style of writing you like, the literary offerings here at Sewanee will foster your craft and teach you to communicate with grace and clarity—all while finding relevance between the pages.
Building upon the great literary tradition of Sewanee, the University now offers a major in creative writing with three different tracks (Fiction, Playwriting, or Poetry). In addition to the major, there is a certificate program in creative writing. Using existing creative works to help you understand styles and elements, workshops focus on critiquing your original work with a group of your peers.
Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated writer whose work has received support from the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Whiting Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story, “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. In 2022 her fiction was longlisted for the Disquiet Prize. She is the first-ever and only fiction writer to be awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for creative work. An Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow, she is the recipient of the George M. Harper Award. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” winner of the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. Her prose appears in a number of journals and anthologies. She currently serves as Contributing Editor for the Kenyon Review, where she curated Art and The Moment and co-curated On Books and Their Harbors as well as Proof Casts a Shadow.
Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook of poems, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019) and was recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and two editions of the annual Best New Poetsanthology. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he most recently has lived in Brooklyn, New York. Find more at www.jimwhitesidepoetry.com
Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s plays include Gee's Bend, Fresh Kills, Provenance, The Flagmaker of Market Street, The Furniture of Home, White Lightning, Looks Like Pretty, Everything That’s Beautiful, and Georgia Mae James Unplugs America. She has received commissions from the Sloan Foundation, Geva Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, Alliance Theatre, and Baltimore Center Stage. Her plays have been produced at the Royal Court (London), Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center, Cleveland Play House, KC Rep, Northlight, the Arden, B Street Theatre, and Hartford Stage, among others. She was the recipient of the Osborn Award given by the American Theatre Critics Association and is a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow. Elyzabeth is a graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University, where she was a Tisch Dramatic Writing Fellow. She is a proud alumnus of Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. Elyzabeth has written for television and film, and is a member of the Writers Guild of America.
Kevin Wilson is the New York Times-bestselling author of four novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), which was made into a feature film with Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman, Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017), Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a Read with Jenna selection by the Today Show, and Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 2022), as well as two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth(Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018). His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Southern Review, and elsewhere, as well as two editions of Best American Short Stories. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (B.A.) and the University of Florida (M.F.A.).
At the heart of Fablemaker is imaginative necessity. Through Burmese folktales, formal invention, and addresses to a “dear fellow fablemaker,” Tu’s poems utilize the speculative to alchemize the pains of a fractured life into something hopeful, imagining a world that, after its burning, recovers.
In the spring 2024 semester, Sewanee Creative Writing students Joe Harned and Eleanor Yarbrough were selected to attend the Barter Theatre College Playwrights Festival. Students had the opportunity to develop their original work with professional Barter artists and playwrights which culminated in a public reading of their plays.
A newcomer to playwriting, Carson Mendheim, C’25, takes the Critics Choice Award at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Young Southern Writers Program by mining personal history and navigating the intersection of Southern culture and queer identity.
Two teens make posters with a mysterious phrase, and end up starting something they can't finish. NPR's Scott Simon talks with Kevin Wilson about his new novel, "Now Is Not the Time to Panic."
Professor Elyzabeth Wilder has won the prestigious Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship. The Tennessee Arts Commission awards the Individual Artist Fellowship annually to recognize and acknowledge outstanding professional Tennessee artists who add to the state’s cultural vitality. Wilder is one of just five artists named as this year’s fellows.
How do we tell stories that matter? How do we make our voice heard in a way that connects us to the larger world?
If you're interested in storytelling, the Beginning Fiction Workshop provides you with the opportunity to develop your skills, study unique and diverse stories from contemporary literature, and share and discuss creative work amongst a group of students in a welcoming space. The primary goal of the course is to help each writer find their own particular voice while utilizing distinct elements of craft. The beginning workshop allows for students to generate multiple stories over the course of the semester, and over the course of the semester we will develop a common language so we can discuss the stories with sensitivity, specificity, and generosity.
You've learned all of the rules, now it's time to break them. In Forms in Drama, we explore plays that experiment with form and structure. Each week we read a play that in some way challenges the boundaries of traditional storytelling, and then we complete a writing writing assignment in response to that play. For example, we will learn about metatheatricality as we read Robert O'Hara's, Bootycandy, discuss the power of silence in Small Mouth Sounds, study absurdism in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fairview, and look at creating dystopian worlds on stage in The Nether. The goal is to think outside the box as we study craft and convention. This is an excellent opportunity for students who are interested in challenging themselves to make bigger, bolder choices in a safe and supportive workshop environment.
Why study and write the novella? The novella, unlike the novel, is wieldy enough to be imagined, written, and workshopped over the course of a semester. Similarly, its form, and literary merit can be examined in some depth over 15 weeks. Shorter than a novel—between 18,000 and 25,000 words—but longer than a traditional short story—really, the middle child of the word count world—the novella, or as some might cheekily call it “the short novel,” is the perfect form to practice writing long form fiction—be honest, you’ve been working on a novel since you were 12 and you’re convinced that this particular “novel” needs another form to fit into, one that allows you to actually finally finish a complete draft!—so this seminar will be devoted to making that happen. In this class we will examine the three-act story structure, elements that go into crafting an outline, and endings. We will give careful consideration to cultivating the following aspects of fiction in our own writing: how to develop major and minor characters, how to utilize different point-of-view strategies, how to develop acute and chronic tension and how to maintain these two types of tension to keep a reader engaged in the story, how to establish and utilize the setting a story takes place in, how to sustain voice, how to deploy subtext and stage desire in extended scenes etc. We will read, read, read because as R. O Kwon said, reading is as much, if not, more important than writing!
Moving from the introductory to the intermediate level, we will deepen and broaden our thinking around the art of poetry - and specifically, its contemporary moment. You will move from gently exploring and contemplating how/why poems work to crafting unique arguments around how/why poems work. A large component of the course is drafting and workshopping your own poems, as well as revising poems for your final portfolio.
Founded in 1892, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the 20th century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Ezra Pound, have appeared in the magazine. The Sewanee Review also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent—like publishing some Flannery O’Connor’s first work.
The Sewanee Writers' Conference is where writers, agents, and participants gather to be creative and collaborate. Attend writing workshops, readings, panel presentations, lectures on the craft of poetry, fiction, and playwriting, and numerous social gatherings. Come connect with fellow writers. This conference is sure to ignite your muse.
Need help with a paper? The Writing Center provides you with objective peer support and instruction for writing projects. The student tutors represent a wide range of majors, and they can help you at any stage in the writing process—topic development, rough drafts, final drafts, revisions, etc. They’re basically your cheerleader from brainstorming to final draft.
Gailor Hall 24, Ext. 1236
