Poets Rodney Jones and Maurice Manning will read from their work on Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. CDT. The Sewanee Writers' Conference Reading Series event will be held in Gailor Auditorium on the campus of Sewanee: The University of the South. Books will be for sale, and the authors will sign copies during the reception that follows.
Mr. Jones has published eight books of poetry including Elegy for the Southern Drawl (2001), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Transparent Gestures (1989), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Honors include the Hanes Award for Poetry, the Harper Lee Award, and the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Jones is a professor and distinguished scholar emeritus at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Mr. Manning is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Gone and the Going Away (2013). His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. In 2009 Mr. Manning was awarded the Hanes Poetry Prize by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2012 he received the Lee Smith Award from Lincoln Memorial University. Mr. Manning teaches at Transylvania University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
This reading is sponsored by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in conjunction with the Sewanee Arts Festival and the Department of English.