Director: John Grammer

John Grammer is a Professor of English at Sewanee, where until recently he chaired the English department.  Born and raised in Texas, he received his B.A. at Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.  Before coming to Sewanee, he taught at Hollins College in Virginia; since arriving here in 1992 he has taught classes in American Literature and American Studies and has frequently participated in Sewanee's interdisciplinary Humanities Program.  His 1996 book Pastoral and Politics in the Old South won the C. Hugh Holman Award as the best book of the year in Southern literary study, and his essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, The Southern Literary Journal, The Sewanee Review and other journals.  He thinks it's high time he got started on another book project; his three young children, on the other hand, believe he should spend more time playing with them, and they tend to get their way.  John is married to Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, also a Sewanee English professor and Director of the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference.

Coordinator: Meg Binnicker

Meg Binnicker has lived on an academic calendar all her life.  After graduating from Sewanee, she taught history and English on the secondary level and more recently has served as both a visiting Professor in the University's History department and as a volunteer tutor at Sewanee Elementary School.  Holder of a doctorate with emphasis in historic preservation, she served as assisting editor of The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture and A History of Tennessee Arts.  Meg is also the product of a summer Master's Degree program, holding the MALS degree from Dartmouth, and brings to her work as Coordinator a clear memory of the pleasures and pressures of summer graduate study.  A native of Middle Tennessee, Meg lives in Sewanee, where on nice afternoons she and George, her large dog, are often seen walking one another.

Dick Hall

Dick Hall has taught ninth-grade and eleventh-grade English at the Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia, for thirty years. During that tenure he has served as English department head, upper-school principal, and assistant headmaster. He co-developed Lovett’s American Studies curriculum, uniting the study of American literature with that of history, art, and music. Dick Hall received his B.A. from Eckerd College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American Literature from Emory University.

John Hollander

John Hollander is simultaneously one of the leading poets and one of the most significant literary scholars of his generation. His poetic career was launched when W.H. Auden chose him for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1958, for A Crackling of Thorns, his first book. Since then he has published seventeen more books of poetry, including Types of Shape, Spectral Emanations, Powers of Thirteen, Tesserae, and Picture Window. His works of literary criticism include Rhyme’s Reason, The Work of Poetry, and others. As a scholarly editor he prepared the Library of America volumes Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and the Henry James: Complete Stories, among many others. His honors include the Bollingen Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

John T. Irwin

John Irwin divides his energies about equally between scholarship and verse. His scholarly works include Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, American Hieroglyphic: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance , and A Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story . The last book won both the Christian Gauss Prize from Phi Beta Kappa and the Aldo Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association. Irwin has also published, under the pen name John Bricuth, three volumes of poetry: The Heisenberg Variations , Just Let Me Say This About That , and As Long as It’s Big . John Irwin was for many years the chairman of the famous Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, where he still serves as Decker Professor of the Humanities. His recent activities include publishing another critical study, Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, and editing The Hopkins Review, a literary journal that ceased publishing in 1953 but was re-launched, thanks largely to Irwin’s efforts, in 2007.

Kathy Prado

Kathy Prado, the daughter of a high school teacher, has herself taught high school English for 25 years, most recently as Chair of the English Department at Carroll High School in Southlake, Texas. Holder of the B.A. from Henderson State University and the M.A. from Texas Women’s University (where she was Outstanding Graduate of 1992), she is certified as a Writing and Grammar Trainer in the New Jersey Writing Project in Texas and as an Advanced Placement teacher in English Literature, English Grammar, and World History. She serves as an essay-reader for the Advanced Placement Examination.

Rosanna Warren

Rosanna Warren is Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. The author of four books of poetry (Departure, Stained Glass, Each Leaf Shines Separate, and Snow Day), she has also published, with Stephen Scully, a translation of Euripides's Suppliant Women. She has been awarded, among other honors, the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.