New England Review

NER announces new virtual reading series

NER Front Row

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. 

In partnership with

NER Launch Reading — Issue 43.3

Join us for a virtual launch celebration!

Featuring Neighbor by Aubrey Levinthal

New England Review, in partnership with the Vermont Studio Center, will host a virtual launch party reading for issue 43.3 on Thursday, October 13, at 7:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. Contributors Da-Lin, D. M. Aderibigbe, Katie Moulton, TR Brady, and Iris A. Law will read their work from the issue, followed by a brief Q&A.

Register for the event here. A private Zoom link will be provided. Registration closes one hour before the event begins.

D. M. Aderibigbe’s debut book, How the End First Showed (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poets. He’s the recipient of a 2022–2023 Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission and other fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the James Merrill House, OMI/Ledig House, Ucross, Jentel, and Boston University. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He’s an assistant professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

TR Brady is a poet and fiber artist. Their work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the cofounder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a new journal of poetry and hybrid text.

Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Kundiman fellow whose poems have appeared in journals such as Hyphen, Menagerie, and Waxwing and are anthologized in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022), she is also cofounder and editor of the literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

Da-Lin explores time, death, and cultural clashes in her fiction with a dash of weird. She grew up in Asia (Taiwan), grew again in North America (Canada and USA), and is now experiencing growing pains once more in her third and probably-not-final continent of Europe (Portugal). She has won the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and the James Kirkwood Literary Award. Her works in progress include a multigenerational mystery novel spanning 100 years of Taiwanese history, a short story collection, and a nonfiction book about the pursuit of nirvana. For more, visit Da-Lin.com.

Katie Moulton is the author of the memoir Dead Dad Club (Audible, 2022). Her writing appears in Sewanee Review, Oxford American, the Believer, Electric Literature, No Depression, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Art Omi, Djerassi, Tin House, and other organizations. From St. Louis, she lives in Baltimore.

Alumni Reading

Middlebury Reunion 2022

New England Review is pleased to announce the return of its annual gathering of Middlebury College alumni and faculty authors during Middlebury’s reunion weekend, on Saturday, June 11, at 1:00-2:00 p.m. Axinn Center, Room 229, Middlebury College. For reunion attendees only.

This year brings a range of accomplished alumni—Richard Hawley (’67), Suzanne Wise (’87), Alicia Wright (’11.5), and Matthew Wilson (’22)—as well as faculty and alumna author Stacie Cassarino (’97). They will read from a range of poems, stories, essays, and more.

Stacie Cassarino (’97 & Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures) is the author of the poetry collection Zero at the Bone (2009), which received the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award, and a critical work, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2018). She was awarded the 92Y “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Agni, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont with her three daughters and teaches at Middlebury College.

Richard Hawley (’67), a writer of fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, has published more than thirty books and monographs. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, American Film, Commonweal, America, Orion, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Christian Science Monitor, and others.  He is the former headmaster of University School in Cleveland and the founding president of the International Boys Schools Coalition. For ten years he taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Matthew Wilson (’22), who just graduated from Middlebury with a degree in English & American Literatures, grew up in East Burke, Vermont, where he attended Burke Mountain Academy as an elite Alpine ski racer. His work to date is grounded in place and person, weaving together the physical and psychological experience of growing up in the Northeast Kingdom. In the future, he intends to apply to MFA programs where he will develop a keener sense of language and expand his writer’s mind.  

Suzanne Wise (’87) is the author of four collections of poetry and prose. Her books of poetry include The Book of Space (Tammy) and The Kingdom of the Subjunctive (Alice James Books). Her poetry has also been published in dozens of journals—including Bennington Review, Boston Review, Bomb, Green Mountains Review, Ploughshares, and Tikkun—andshe has been awarded writing residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her other writing includes news, reviews, and essays about art, poetry, and culture. She is currently at work on a graphic memoir and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Alicia Wright (’11.5), originally from Georgia, received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English & Literary Arts: Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Paris Review, Ecotone, Third Coast, jubilat, and others. An NER intern in 2011, she served as the 2020–2021 Denver Quarterly Editorial Fellow and works currently as its Managing Editor; she is also the editor of Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. 

NER Poetry Celebration

Video now available

If you missed our poetry celebration live on Zoom, you can now catch it here on Vimeo!

During this reading from the current issue of New England Review—Rick Barot’s last issue as poetry editor—we celebrated Rick’s seven years at the helm and welcomed new poetry editor Jennifer Chang, who read a poem from the forthcoming issue.

Featured in this reading are Philipe AbiYouness, Kaveh Akbar, Jennifer Grotz, Jenny Johnson, Dana Levin, Cate Marvin, Wayne Miller, Matthew Olzmann, Carl Phillips, Kevin Prufer, and Paul Tran. With thanks to Joe DeFelice from Middlebury’s media services.

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