New England Review is pleased to announce our new virtual reading series, NER Front Row. This one-hour, free-to-the-public event pairs Middlebury College students with established writers in a unique format that highlights the resonance of literature when it’s performed aloud. Each Front Row event will begin with a student performance, followed by the author’s reading of the same piece. This intimate presentation will provide audiences with a real-time glance into how different readers bring their distinct experience to a single text. The author and student will then engage in a brief conversation that complicates and enriches the space between interpretation and intent. An audience Q&A, moderated by the editors, will follow.
Our NER Front Row kickoff event featuring poet Matthew Olzmann and Middlebury College student Sylvie Shure will be held on Thursday, November 3 at 8 p.m. EST on Zoom. Register here.
Left: Matthew Olzmann. Right: Sylvie Shure
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize) and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Sylvie Shure ‘24.5 is a political science and Russian major from California. She is a YoungArts alumna and a reader for NER, and she spends all of her free time writing.
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