Thanks to the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, brought to us by Maggie Blake Bailey, L'17, the John Grammer Fellowship brings a noted writer for an extended stay during the summer session. The John Grammer Fellow conducts a reading of their work and collaborates with students in a workshop setting.

John Grammer, professor of English at the University of the South, teaches classes in British and American literature, American Studies, and Sewanee’s interdisciplinary Humanities Program. He received a BA at Vanderbilt University and a PhD at the University of Virginia. 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. His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Oxford American, Southern Literary Journal, Sewanee Review and other journals, and in such books as The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and Blackwell’s Guide to the Literature and Culture of the American South.

Maggie Blake Bailey, Poet and High School Teacher | Atlanta, GA

She holds degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Brown, but it's her MFA from the School of Letters that Maggie holds most dear. Clearly a lover of learning, Maggie applied to Sewanee because she wanted to study and write poetry.

"I think a lot of us are waiting to be knighted, for someone to come along and say, 'You are good enough. Now you should start.' But no one will do that. You do that for yourself." And so she did. The same year she was accepted into the program she also published her first poem.

Just five years later, in 2015, Maggie published her first chapbook, Bury the Lede, and 2019 published her first full-length collection, Visitation. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice and her work can be found in Tar River Poetry, Still: The Journal, SWWIM, and others.

"Sewanee is a profoundly beautiful place that rewards your attention. The program allowed me to think of myself as a writer and to prioritize that part of myself."