Department of English

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.

For the past year, artist Diana Matar has been photographing at over 200 sites where police violence has occurred in America for a project entitled “This Violent Land”. In this lecture Ms. Matar will speak about how she uses her camera to question not only the romantic photographic interpretation of the American dream, but also the nation’s acceptance of violence against its citizens at a time of deep social and political change.

Senior Reception for the Department of English & American Literatures

“The Middlebury Fellows in Narrative Journalism — Georgia Grace Edwards, Juliette Luini, Miyo McGinn, Sabine Poux, Julia Trencher — have completed a year-long series of podcasts that asked students the question, “How Did You Get Here?” The fellows have crafted 15 unique and compelling digital portraits of students who have described their journeys to Middlebury. Please join us to watch and listen to these stories. Pizza and refreshments will be served!”

Students who have been a part of the Narrative Journalism Fellowship have been working all year on a podcast titled ‘How Did You Get Here?’ which interviews different students and tells the stories of how they ended up at Middlebury. This event will be a listening event that showcases these stories.

Border South/Frontera Sur is a film about the humanitarian crisis on the U.S./Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. It was created to accompany the completion of Hostile Terrain 94, a global pop up installation in the Center Gallery that commemorates migrant death.

This event will bring families who are working with the Colibrí Center for Human Rights to find a missing family member lost during their migration into the United States through the Sonoran Desert. These family members are working with the Colibrí Center to identify human remains that might help families bring closure to their search. This event is organized in conjunction with the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit in Center Gallery.

Poet Cheswayo Mphanza (‘16) will read from his award winning collection, The Rinehart Frames. Mphanza was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a B.A. in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in poetry from Rutgers-Newark. His work has appeared in the New England Review, the Paris Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere.