Owen Davis, an 1889 graduate, won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Icebound in 1923.

Pamela Yvonne Tillis attended UT Knoxville in 1979. She is a country music star and daughter of country music great Mel Tillis. She was Country Music Association 1994 female vocalist of the year. She won a Grammy in 1998, and has appeared on Broadway and in TV shows.

Ashley Cleveland, a graduate of UT Knoxville, is a Grammy-award winning singer. She won Grammys in both 1996 and 1999 for Best Rock Gospel Album.

John Cullum (1953) is a Tony award winning actor. He won the top theater award for his roles in Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century. He was the star of the television series Northern Exposure.

Barry Nolan (1969) is an Emmy-award winning news anchor and host of Backstage with Barry Nolen on CN8, the Comcast Network. He appeared on NBC’s Evening Magazine and on Hard Copy. He has also appeared in films and television series. He attended UT as Walter Barett Smith.

Cormac McCarthy is a novelist who attended UT in Knoxville in 1951-52 and 1957-60. He won the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road.

Delores Ziegler (1979) is an opera singer who has performed with Luciano Pavarotti and with major U.S. and European symphonies.

Edward Osborne Wilson, who attended UTK from 1950 to 1951, won two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction for his books On Human Nature and The Ants.

John Noble Wilford (1955) has won two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting. He is science correspondent for the New York Times and founder of the paper’s weekly science section.

Colin Randall Wilcox attended UT from 1953 to 1956.She has appeared in films (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Catch 22, To Kill a Mockingbird), on Broadway (Under the Yum Yum Tree, The Day the Money Stopped, Strange Interlude), and in television shows (Ironsides, Little House on the Prairie, Streets of San Francisco).