A Tribute to Wyatt Prunty

When I first came to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 1995, I was twenty-one, halfway through an MFA program, and so awed by the other writers I could barely bring myself to speak. It amazes me, looking back, that the Conference was actually a fairly recent creation, Wyatt Prunty having started it only six years before. In Wyatt’s own telling, he was a newly arrived faculty member at Sewanee when administrators sought his advice on how best to make use of a legacy from Tennessee Williams, left “for the purposes of encouraging creative writing and creative writers.” The Conference was born fr...