15th Annual Writers’ Workshop

From October 16 to November 8, The Williston Northampton School is hosting the 15th year of the Writers’ Workshop Series. This event brings some of today’s most accomplished and honored writers to campus where they give public lectures and teach private classes for Williston students.

On Tuesday, October 16, Williston hosted Jen duBois ’02, the first alumna to participate as both a student and as an author. Anita Shreve, a Williston parent and award-winning author of The Pilot’s Wife and other novels, spoke on Monday, October 22. Renowned author of the Knuffle Bunny children’s series, Mo Willems, will speak on Thursday, November 1.  Mount Holyoke Mellon Professor of English, Christopher Benfey, will conclude the program on Thursday, November 8.

All lectures are held at 7 p.m. in the Dodge Room, Reed Campus Center. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Jen duBois ’02:  Tuesday, October 16
Jennifer duBois earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Playboy, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, The Northwest Review, and elsewhere. The Dial Press published her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, in March.

Anita Shreve:  Monday, October 22
After graduating from Tufts University, Anita Shreve taught high school in the Boston area and traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived for three years and worked as a journalist for an African magazine. Returning to the United States, Shreve was a writer and editor for a number of magazines in New York. In 1989, she published her first novel, Eden Close. Since then she has written 12 other novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot’s Wife, and The Last Time They Met. In 1998, Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. Shreve has two children and three stepchildren (Williston graduates among them).

Mo Willems: Thursday, November 1
Mo Willems is a three-time Caldecott Honor-winning author for Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Knuffle Bunny, and Knuffle Bunny Too. He also won two Geisel Medals for There Is a Bird on Your Head!, Are You Ready to Play Outside?, and a Geisel Honor for We Are in a Book! His books are perennial New York Times bestsellers, including Knuffle Bunny Free and Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!  Willems was also a writer and animator on Sesame Street, where he won six Emmys. He lives happily ever after with his family in Massachusetts.

Christopher Benfey: Thursday, November 8
Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Benfey’s most recent book, A Summer of Hummingbirds, won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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