Creative Writing

Laurie Sheck will be giving a multimedia presentation about her recently published hybrid fiction: Island of the Mad, which involves the discovery of a mysterious notebook and the life of Dostoevsky and is set in the Venetian lagoon. She is also the author of A Monster’s Notes (2009), centered around the un-named “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, still alive in the 21st century. A Monster’s Notes was nominated for the International DUBLIN Literary Award and was named one of the 10 Best Fictions of the Year by Entertainment Weekly.

A reading by Lauren Markham, ‘06, and Sierra Murdoch ‘09.5, who return to Middlebury to co-teach their J-term class, “Writing What You Don’t Know: The Ethics and Craft of Narrative Journalism.”

Recent alumnae as well as Middlebury Fellows in Environmental Journalism, Markham and Murdoch have recently published or are about to publish major books.

Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word.

J.C. Ellefson, Poet-In-Residence at Champlain College, will read from his latest book of poems, Under the Influence: Shoutin’ out to Walt (2017). Ellefson has published poetry and short fiction in magazines throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Japan. His first book of poems, Foreign Tales of Exemplum and Woe (2015), draws on his experiences teaching in Shanghai and the Azores.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher reads from his new novel, Before All the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which follows two Yiddish-speaking immigrants from a fictional shtetl in Northeastern Ukraine, to Philadelphia of the 1930s, where they connect to a Black, communist writer, and the three of them try to navigate America’s racial and sexual politics, alone and together. 

Short Bio for Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Ana Portnoy Brimmer, poet and organizer from Puerto Rico, will be talking about and reading from her debut poetry collection, To Love An Island. This book offers the stark recognition that disaster is political and colonialism the most violent of storms. Beginning with the aftermath of Hurricane María and spanning the summer insurrection of 2019 and subsequent earthquakes in Puerto Rico, To Love An Island is an exploration of collective trauma, an outpour of amassed grief, a desire for unleashed mourning, a fuck-you to resilience, a brandishing of resistance.

Pamela Erens is the author of the novels Eleven Hours, The Virgins, and The Understory. She has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Eleven Hours, Erens’s most recent novel, was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, NPR, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and the Irish Independent. Erens’s essays and criticism have appeared in venues such as Vogue, Elle, The New York Times, Slate, Virg

Cree LeFavour’s memoir, LIGHTS ON, RATS OUT, was published by Grove-Atlantic in summer, 2017. A writer and academic with a B.A. from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University, she is also the author of several cookbooks, including PORK (2014), James Beard Award Nominated FISH (2013), POULET (2012), and THE NEW STEAK (2008). Her recent book, CHELSEA MARKET MAKERS (2016), is a collaborative effort with Michael Philips.

André Aciman is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, False Papers, Alibis, and four novels: Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, and Enigma Variations. He is the co author and editor of Letters of Transit and of The Proust Project. Aciman is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a fellowship from The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Frank Bidart is widely considered one of the finest poets at work in English. His Collected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2018. He teaches at Wellesley College.