SoL Author Readings, June 26
The Sewanee School of Letters presents a reading with authors Tiana Clark, Ryan Chapman and Jamie Quatro at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 26, in Naylor Auditorium. A reception will follow in the Gailor Atrium.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her next poetry collection, “Scorched Earth,” will be published next year (March 2025). Clark is currently working on, “Begging to be Saved,” a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster.
Ryan Chapman is the author of “Riots I Have Known” (Simon & Schuster), which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Electric Literature and The Marshall Project. NPR praised it as “one of the smartest — and best — novels of the year,” and The Washington Post called it “a compact cluster bomb of satire that kills widely and indiscriminately.” He’s published criticism and short humor pieces at The New Yorker, The Guardian, GQ, Bookforum, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, and interviewed writers and visual artists for Guernica, Esquire, Frieze, and elsewhere.
Jamie Quatro’s debut novel, “Fire Sermon,” published in 2018. Selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. Quatro’s story collection, “I Want to Show you More,” was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times and James Wood in The New Yorker. Grove Press will publish Quatro’s new novel, “Two-Step Devil,” in September 2024, followed by her story collection, “Next Time I’ll Be Louder,” in 2025.
For more information go to <letters.sewanee.edu>.