Department of English

This event was rescheduled from February 20th. 

Join us for a reading by two members of the Middlebury College community in celebration of their debut books.

Middlebury alums Dan O’Brien and J. M. Tyree return to the College having earned acclaim in creative writing since they began sharing their work with one another over thirty years ago as undergraduates. They are currently press-mates: Tyree has recently published his novella, The Haunted Screen with Deep Vellum, and O’Brien has published a memoir, From Scarsdale: A Childhood, and a collection of his plays, True Story: A Trilogy, with Dalkey Archive Press, an imprint of Deep Vellum.

Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, is a specialist of 20^th century France.  She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis.  She is also a literary translator. 

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at CUNY. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, a political commentator on MSNBC, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents. Over the years he served as Editor of The New Republic and wrote for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, and the Financial Times. He is the author of four books including The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Harper, 2010) and The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012).

John Elder returns to the Middlebury College community to share reflections about how poems by Emily Dickinson and the 8th-century writer Du Fu have helped him arrive at a more resolute response to this challenging moment in American history. 

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead.

Documentary Screening: “It Will Be Different for You.” The film is about Middlebury alum Lea Davison, an Olympic Mountain Biker. Another Middlebury Alum - of Creative Writing - Simon Perkins - co-produced the film along with Creative Writing professor Megan Mayhew Bergman.  

Our contemporary age of migration is also a time of “crisis,” with movements from global south to global north perpetually framed in emergency terms. In Italy, these discourses are intimately tied not only to arrivals by sea, but to racialized notions of national identity and a general lack of reckoning with colonial history.

Title: THE TRAUMA MANTRAS

UNSETTLING THE SELF/RETHINKING TRAUMA:  Ethnographic Prose Poems on South Sudanese Refugees and American Attempts to “Heal” Them

Students who completed an English (literature track) thesis or a Creative Writing thesis in the 2023-2024 academic year will read from their work. Light refreshments will be served. Feel free to come and go.