UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Milk Route 2026
MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art. Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
Born in Chicago, Peter Orner is the author of seven acclaimed books including Maggie Brown & Others, Love and Shame and Love,Esther Stories, finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award, and Am I Alone Here?, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is his latest novel, just out from Little Brown. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Stories, and been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. A former Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Orner is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Vermont, where he’s also a volunteer firefighter.
The Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 30 January, 2026, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
The Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 13 February, 2026, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art. Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
Eileen G’Sell
Caxton Club Reading
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, 20 February , 4-5 p.m.
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press. Her second book of poetry, Francofilaments, was published in 2024 by Broken Sleep Books. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, joins Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series in early 2026.
G’Sell’s poetry has been published in Poetry magazine, Fence, and The Boston Review; her essays have been published in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, and Jacobin. She serves as movie critic for The Hopkins Review and frequently reviews film and art for Hyperallergic and Reverse Shot. In 2023, she won the Rabkin Prize for excellence in arts writing. G’Sell teaches writing and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Milk Route 2026
Senior Symposium
302 Alumni Hall
Tuesday 3 March, 2026, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
SENIOR SYMPOSIUM gives Literature Majors the opportunity to synthesize the skills and information acquired as an English major. The course will have a different theme each year. Recent themes include “Adaptation,” “Irony,” “Noir,” “Homeless in the Waste Land,” “On the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” “The Literary Vampire,” “Animal Gothic,” “Visions and Revisions: Three Victorian Novels and Their (Post)modern Reworkings,” “Pulp,” “The Uncanny,” “Trauma and Visuality,” "Bodies on Display," “Hauntology,” "Whiteness in Literature," and “Bodies.” This year our theme is “Play.”
During the first part of the term, students will read and interpret texts much as they would for any upper-level English class. The second part of the term focuses on the Symposium—an opportunity for them to present their ideas to the entire department. The exact format of the Symposium varies from year to year. Students in the course not only present their work, but organize, publicize, and run Symposium. At the end of the term, students compose an article-length piece of literary criticism—an extension and revision of their Symposium presentation—which responds to current scholarship and presents an original argument. This year’s theme is “In Between”