New England Review’s Vermont Reading Series is pleased to present poets and fiction writers Didi Jackson, Jodi Paloni, Ben Pease, and Layla Santos, in the Marquis Theater Café on Wednesday, April 11. The Marquis Café/Bar, at 65 Main Street, Middlebury, VT, is open at 5 pm; the reading begins at 7 pm.

NER’s Vermont Reading Series is co-sponsored by the Vermont Book Shop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Books, beverages, burritos, and other Southwestern dishes will be available to purchase. The event is free and open to the public.

Didi Jackson’s debut collection of poems, Killing Jar, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press (2020). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Common, and the current issue of the New England Review. She teaches Creative Writing, Poetry and the Visual Arts, and Twentieth-Century Poetry of War and Witness at the University of Vermont, and serves as the associate poetry editor for Green Mountains Review.

Jodi Paloni is the author of the short story collection They Could Live with Themselves (Press 53, 2016), a 2017 IPPY Silver Medalist, finalist for the 2017 Maine Book Award, and runner-up in the 2015 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. She was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the 2017 Kenyon Review Summer Writing Workshop and an upstreet scholar at the 2016 VCFA Post-Graduate Conference. A freelance writer, teacher, and editor, she serves on the planning committee for the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Ben Pease is the author of Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse (Big Lucks Books, 2017). He is a board member of the Ruth Stone Foundation and is leading the renovations of Ruth Stone’s property in Goshen, Vermont. He is finishing up two other projects, Fugitives of Speech, an epic poem following teenage filmmakers in Ludlow, Massachusetts, and a collection of poetry about the death of his mother. He lives in Brandon with his wife and daughter.

Layla Santos is a senior political science major at Middlebury College. She was raised in the Bronx and Port Chester, New York. As a first generation Dominican-American, she enjoys exploring aspects of dual identity through her creative work.