Celebrating its29th summer session, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference will run from Tuesday, July 17, through Saturday, July 28, and feature readings, panels and lectures by nationally-recognized faculty, editors, publishers and literary agents.

The Conference will begin with a reading by fiction writer Randall Kenan on July 17, at 8:15 p.m. All readings and lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the University of the South’s Mary Sue Cushman Room of the Bairnwick Women’s Center.

Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, “A Visitation of Spirits,” and a collection of stories, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Kenan was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The first week will also feature readings by fiction writers Steve Yarbrough, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice McDermott, Adrianne Harun and Jill McCorkle; poets B.H. Fairchild and Mark Jarman; and playwright Lauren Yee. The second week will feature readings by fiction writers Richard Bausch, Tony Earley, Jeffery Renard Allen, Allan Gurganus, Michael Knight and Christine Schutt; poets Caki Wilkinson, Marilyn Nelson, Sidney Wade, Greg Williamson, Wyatt Prunty, Maurice Manning, A.E. Stallings and Charles Martin; and playwright Dan O’Brien.

Editors from 32 Poems, 5E, Algonquin Books, The American Scholar, Blackbird, Copper Canyon Press, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, Grand Central Publishing, Grove Atlantic, The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Knopf, Lookout Books, The Missouri Review, The New Criterion, New Directions, Northwestern University Press, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, University of Arkansas Press, and The Weekly Standard will discuss publishing, as will agents from Aevitas Creative Management, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency, ICM Partners, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents, The Williams Company, and The Wylie Agency.

Agents from Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Folio Literary Management, and The Gernert Company will also be in attendance, and representatives from Actors Theatre of Louisville and Agency for the Performing Arts will meet with playwrights.

A complete Conference schedule can be found on page 5, or online at <sewaneewriters.org/schedule>. Authors’ books are available for purchase at the University Book & Supply Store.

Supported by the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund established through the estate of the late Tennessee Williams, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference offers instruction and criticism to writers through a series of workshops, readings and craft lectures in poetry, fiction and playwriting. For more information, call (931) 598-1654 or visit <sewaneewriters.org>.