Creative Writing

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.

Philip Dean Walker is a Class of 2000 graduate of Middlebury College (B.A. American Literature). He received his MFA in Creative Writing from American University in 2013. His first book, At Danceteria and Other Stories was cited by Kirkus Reviews as a “Best Book of 2017,” received their coveted Kirkus Star in their review, and was a semi-finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction in 2017.

With a mediative foreword by Teju Cole, Emmanuel Iduma’s beguiling writing in A Stranger’s Pose takes the reader on a journey across 23 African cities. It is part memoir, part, travel writing and part meditation. His sensuous storytelling is interspersed with over 40 mesmerising black and white photographs from acclaimed contemporary African photographers, including a description of his encounter with the famed photographer Malick Sidibe. In his talk and reading at Middlebury College, Iduma will discuss notion