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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.

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