Fred Sauceman, Executive Assistant to the President for University Relations at East Tennessee State University, has over 30 years of experience in media and public relations work, having gotten his start in radio at his hometown stations, WGRV and WSMG in Greeneville. He went on to work for WKPT-TV News in Kingsport, did freelance writing for American Greetings, and spent five years as head of public relations at Roane State Community College in Harriman, before returning to Northeast Tennessee in 1985 to oversee the public relations operation at ETSU.

Fred’s articles on food, bluegrass music, and Southern culture have appeared in several magazines, and in 2000, he published Home and Away: A University Brings Food to the Table, a 784-page book featuring the cookery and foodlore of Southern Appalachia. His ruminations on Southern food and culture and his restaurant reviews appear regularly in Marquee magazine. In March of 2003, he began writing a weekly food column, “The Place Setting,” for The Kingsport-Times News.

Fred is a member of the Board of Directors of the Southern Foodways Alliance, headquartered at the University of Mississippi, and served on the editorial board of Cornbread Nation 1, the first annual compendium of nonfiction writing about Southern food, published in October of 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Fred hosts a weekly radio program, “ETSU Voices,” every Monday morning at 9:35 on WJCW, AM 910, and oversees the operation of ETSU’s National Public Radio affiliate station, WETS-FM, 89.5.

In addition to his administrative duties, Fred teaches “Foodways of the American South” through the ETSU Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and “American Major Authors” through the ETSU English Department. He earned a B.A. in English and history and an M.A. in English from ETSU and authored a master’s thesis about North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe.