Left to right: Hugh Coyle, Maria Padian, Lewis Robinson, Gretchen Schrafft, Spring Ulmer
Reunion weekend at Middlebury College brings together alumni authors from far and wide, and to celebrate the occasion the New England Review is hosting a reading for five Middlebury College faculty and alumni writers. Please join us for this free event on Saturday, June 10, 12:30 pm ET, in the Axinn Center at Starr Library, Room 229.
Reading this year will be Spring Ulmer, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, along with a range of accomplished alumni, including Hugh Coyle (’83), Maria Padian (’83), Lewis Robinson (’93), and Gretchen Schrafft (’08). They will read poems, stories, essays, and more.
Hugh Coyle (’83), after graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, worked at Bread Loaf’s School of English and Writers’ Conference. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Heekin award, a Camargo Foundation fellowship, and grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center. His publications include New England Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, Café Review, and Christopher Street. Hugh recently attended Middlebury’s German Language School as a Kathryn Wasserman Davis Peace Fellow. He has presented his research on Bertha von Suttner, the first female Nobel peace prize laureate, at the Peace Palace in The Hague.
Maria Padian (’83) has worked as a news reporter, an essayist for public radio, a press secretary for a US congressman, and a freelance writer. As an undergraduate at Middlebury, Maria majored in English and credits wonderful professors such as Elizabeth Mansfield, Robert Pack, John Elder, and Jay Parini with teaching her how to write. The author of five novels for young adults, Maria lives with her family in Maine where she is at work on a new novel. To learn more about her, visit www.mariapadian.com.
Lewis Robinson (’93) is the author of the novel Water Dogs (Random House, 2009), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Officer Friendly and Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2003), winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and the forthcoming novel Islanders (Islandport Press, 2024). His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sports Illustrated, Tin House, The Baffler, The New York Times Book Review and on NPR’s program Selected Shorts. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, Colby College, the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program, and currently teaches at the University of Maine Farmington. He lives in Portland, Maine. To learn more about him, visit www.lewisrobinson.com.
Gretchen Schrafft (’08) is a fiction writer, journalist and educator. She holds a BA from Middlebury, an MFA from Oregon State University, and a PhD in Literature and Literary Arts from the University of Denver. Her work has most recently been supported by Lighthouse Works and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has written a novel, Spectral Evidence, about how our colonial past is very much present in our country’s current battle over reproductive freedom. To learn more about her, visit www.gretchenschrafft.com.
Spring Ulmer, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College, is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s 2007 First Book Award), The Age of Virtual Reproduction, and Bestiality of the Involved. Her forthcoming Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April won the 2022 Dorset Prize (judged by Diane Seuss). Ulmer lives in Essex, New York, with her son.