New England Review is pleased to present its annual gathering of Middlebury College alumni and faculty authors during Middlebury’s reunion weekend on Saturday, June 10, at 2:30 p.m. Axinn Center, Room 229, Middlebury College. In addition to featuring Middlebury College President Laurie Patton, who will read from her poetry and translations, this year brings a range of accomplished alumni. Serena Crawford, Henriette Lazaridis, James Moore, and Daniel Robb will read from their poems, stories, and essays. Vermont Book Shop will be on hand to sell books. Free and open to the public.
Serena Crawford’s story collection, Here Among Strangers, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Willow Springs Books and Lost Horse Press in 2016. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Ascent, Beloit Fiction Journal, McNeese Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA from the University of Oregon. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, she recently moved from Portland, Oregon, to Madison, Connecticut.
Henriette Lazaridis‘s debut novel, The Clover House, was published by Ballantine Books in 2013 and was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her work has earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant and has appeared in publications including ELLE, Narrative Magazine, the Millions, the New York Times online, the Huffington Post, and—to her unending delight— the New England Review. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches creative writing at GrubStreet in Boston. She is the founding editor of the Drum Literary Magazine and she runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. A competitive rower, Lazaridis trains regularly on the Charles River.
James Moore majored in English and dance at Middlebury College and graduated in 2012. He also received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College in 2016, where he teaches composition and works at Four Way Books. He lives in New York.
Laurie L. Patton is the author or editor of nine books and more than fifty articles on South Asian history, culture, and religion, and has translated the classical Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics). In addition, she has published two books of poetry, Angel’s Task: Poems in Biblical Time (Barrytown/Station Hill) and Fire’s Goal: Poems from the Hindu Year (White Cloud Press). Patton became the 17th president of Middlebury on July 1, 2015. She joined Middlebury after serving for four years as dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and as the Robert F. Durden Professor of Religion. From 1996 to 2011, Patton served on the faculty and administration at Emory University. Patton began her career at Bard College, where she was assistant professor of Asian religions from 1991 to 1996.
Daniel Robb, a graduate of Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English, has made his living as a teacher, writer, editor, carpenter, and political consultant. His books include Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working with Troubled Boys and Sloop: Restoring My Family’s Wooden Sailboat, both published by Simon & Schuster. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and two children in a small town where, among other things, he is the Moderator of Town Meeting.