Department of English

Dan O’Brien, award-winning playwright and poet, is author of the play “The Body of an American,” poetry collections “War Reporter” and “Scarsdale,” and two opera libretti. He graduated from Middlebury College majoring in English and Theater, received an MFA at Brown University, and has taught and done residencies at many institutions including Princeton, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives in Los Angeles.

Senior Reception for the Department of English & American Literatures

Senior Reception for the Department of English & American Literatures

Creating Connections Consortium (C3) Diversity Research and Teaching Summit. Scholars from Connecticut and Williams Colleges will join Middlebury faculty and postdoctoral fellows to discuss field-leading research across the liberal arts and innovative teaching pedagogy.

Brittany Cavallaro ’09 published her prize-winning first collection of poems, “Girl-King”, earlier this year, and her first young adult novel, “A Study in Charlotte”, will appear in 2016. She won a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship in 2014, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Since retiring from teaching English Literature in Italian universities, Bill Dodd has lived in a small village in Tuscany surrounded by oak forests. He divides his time between writing poetry and laboring with his wife on her flower farm, enjoying encounters with the many creatures who visit them there. He will be reading from his collection of poems, Sightings.

Before coming to Middlebury Khalid graduated from Eaglebrook and Loomis Chaffee; after Middlebury he served with Teach for America in Mississippi; then taught at Amistad Academy, a renowned charter school in New Haven, Connecticut. He will be receiving his M.A. in Education from the Johns Hopkins University School of Education in the coming months. At Taft, Khalid teaches four sections of English and works with the debate team.

Meet the Press presents: The 12 Commandments of Storytelling—NPR’s Kitchen Sisters Talk Radio and Podcasting

“Shakespeare’s Songs”: An afternoon of art songs by the Bard re-imagined for the music parlor by Schubert, Quilter, Coleridge-Taylor, Finzi and Stanford. Jack DesBois ‘15.5, bass, and Mal Chase, piano, present a delightful program of songs from Shakespeare’s plays. The Bard of Avon knew the dramatic power of music and wielded it skilfully throughout his works. However, very few scores or indications of his songs’ settings survive, leaving posterity to guess at the tunes he intended for his words - or to write new tunes altogether.

Hisham Matar will discuss his Pulitzer prize winning book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken prisoner in Libya. Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Matar was able to return to his homeland for the first time. In this heart-breaking, illuminating memoir he describes his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again.