Please join us for NER’s annual gathering of Middlebury alumni and faculty authors during  reunion weekend on Saturday, June 9, at 2:30 p.m. Axinn Center, Room 229, Middlebury College.

This year brings a range of accomplished alumni from classes ranging from 1968 to 2013, with Salena Casha, Laura Irei, Peter Knobler, and J. T. Price, along with Russian translator and Middlebury College professor emeritus Michael R. Katz. The authors will read from a range of poems, stories, essays, and translations. Books will be available for signing; free and open to the public.

Salena Casha’s work (nonfiction, poetry, and fiction) has appeared in more than fifty publications, including Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Fiction Vortex, and Jellyfish Review. Her fiction has been included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions and in the 2017 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. She was a finalist for the 2013–2014 Boston Public Library’s Children’s Writer-in-Residence, and while she was a student at Middlebury she served as an intern for New England Review and won a 2011 Middlebury student scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Laura Irei graduated from Middlebury in 2013 and moved to Boston where she followed the time-honored tradition of working as a barista and writing in her spare time. She went on to attend the University of South Carolina as a Presidential Fellow, also serving on the editorial board of the Yemassee literary journal and working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. She recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing, along with a collection of short stories titled Uncertain Animals. She won a student scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate at Middlebury and was an intern at New England Review. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Michael R. Katz is C.V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has written two books, one on the Russian literary ballad and one on dreams in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. He has translated more than fifteen Russian novels into English, including, most recently, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2017). His translations of Chekhov, Jabotinsky, Akunin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shcheglov, and others have appeared in New England Review.

Peter Knobler, a writer who specializes in memoir and autobiography collaboration, has written books with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Gov. Ann Richards, Sumner Redstone, Mayor David Dinkins, and Tommy Hilfiger. He is currently working with former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton on a book examining the fifty-year arc of policing in America. He was the editor-in-chief of Crawdaddy, the first magazine to take rock & roll seriously, and is the journalist who discovered Bruce Springsteen for the rock press. Knobler has co-written songs with Chris Hillman, Steve Miller, Freedy Johnston, and the E Street Band’s Garry Tallent, and received a Sports Emmy Award nomination for his work on the program Baseball’s Golden Age. He is creator of the podcast Songs I Send My Son That He Sends Immediately to Spam.

J. T. Price has lived in Brooklyn since graduating from Middlebury in 2001. His fiction has appeared in New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, Joyland, the Brooklyn Rail, Electric Literature, and elsewhere; nonfiction, interviews, and reviews have been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, the Scofield, and the Millions. He received an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College in 2009 and an MA in English Literature from the Bread Loaf School of English in 2014.