SARA FAY
EGAN
Sara Fay Egan is president and CEO of Beale Street Blues Company, a Hospitality and Restaurant Group and Entertainment Company. Sara Fay, originally from Memphis, TN, graduated from the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. After graduating, Sara Fay moved to Dallas, TX where she spent over nine years planning, designing, and executing weddings and events both locally and nationally as the national sales director of weddings for Todd Events.
Sara Fay opened Jackson Durham Floral and Event Design in 2012 and ran the company until she sold her ownership in 2019. At that time, she opened Sara Fay Egan Events, which specialized in planning a limited number of high-end destination weddings. Sara Fay executed many successful weddings and events all over the world including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maine, Washington DC, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, West Virginia, California, Rhode Island, Michigan, Mexico, The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Italy.
Her understanding of all aspects of the hospitality industry has elevated her to a sought-after expert in the field. Her experiences in event planning, starting and owning businesses, and now running her family business—combined with her unbelievable personal and life experiences—compelled her to write her debut book,
The Through Line: Finding Happiness Through the Curveballs of Life, Family, and Business, available Jan. 21st.
But family is most important to Sara Fay.
She and her husband, Merrick, have two children, Grace, thirteen, and Walker, ten, and she feels compelled to tell her stories and share lessons of family, life, and business. Through it all, she’s discovered that true happiness doesn’t come from a perfect plan — it’s about embracing who you really are, leaning into relationships, and finding moments of joy amidst the mess.
For more information about The Grace Fund for autoimmune research or to donate to UT Southwestern please
Our daughter, Grace, was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis in November of 2021. Grace has what is called seronegative autoimmune encephalitis, which means we do not know which antibodies in her brain are being attacked. Her neurologist, Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, has an eloquent analogy to explain this. He says, “Think of the galaxy. We have names for about one hundred stars, but there are hundreds of thousands of stars in the galaxy that have not been discovered.”
The Grace Fund aims to raise awareness and money for autoim- mune research. An autoimmune disease is any disease that occurs when the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between its own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to attack normal cells mistakenly. More than eighty types of autoimmune diseases exist and affect a wide range of body parts.We hope that in the next five years, children showing symptoms like Grace will be more easily identified as having encephalitis, and these antibodies will help create cures and treatments. These cures and treatments will be for encephalitis and potentially other autoim- mune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, lupus, celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.
