The Sewanee Young Writers' Conference was founded by Dr. Elizabeth Grammer, Teaching Professor of English, in 1993. Sewanee's campus has long been host to an extraordinary gathering of literary stars, including Randall Kenan, Tarfia Faizullah, Richard Wilbur, Claire Messud, Arthur Miller, Amitava Kumar, Derek Walcott, Patricia Smith, Venita Blackburn, Francine Prose, Horton Foote, Mark Strand, Alice McDermott, and Ernest Gaines, among many others. Impressive writers like these visit us for two weeks of intensive literary discussion and creation every July, during the internationally prominent Sewanee Writers’ Conference, made possible by the bequest of playwright Tennessee Williams. The participants in that conference range in age from their twenties to their seventies, but couldn’t there be a version for younger people, drawing on the resources of the existing program? That was Dr. Grammer's idea for the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.
Dr. Grammer directed the SYWC from its first summer, in 1994, until 2023, with impressive results. She is the author of a critically acclaimed scholarly book, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2003). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, The Journal of Southern History, American Historical Review, and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. She is married to John M. Grammer, also a professor of English at the University of the South, and is the mother of three children.
