You have a story you want to tell. An escaped convict kills a family on a road trip; an ex-priest helps his daughter cover up a deadly hit-and-run. How do you know which character/s should tell the tale? Would the story be best-served by a single POV? Multiple? Does it require first-person narration? Third? Or the wily, worn, but wonderful-when-it-works second person? And how close do you want your lens — a close-up, free-indirect style, or a non-time-bound omniscience? We’ll look at various examples in contemporary stories, then do some generative writing based on prompts. Students will have time to share work aloud.
The class will be followed at 7:30 by a reading with Jamie, and conversation with Porch co-founder Susannah Felts.
Jamie's visit is supported in part by a grant from the Amazon Literary Partnership.
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the novel has been named a New York Times Editor's Choice, a 2025 ALA Notable Book, and a Best Book of 2024 by the Paris Review and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A new story collection is forthcoming from Grove Press.
Quatro’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program, and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Jamie joins us for our 2026 Visiting Writers Series. Welcome!
