Left to right: Tamara Hilmes, EJ Kavounas, Carolyn Kuebler, Emily Lee Luan, & Lauren Markham
In celebration of Middlebury’s reunion weekend, New England Review will host a reading for five alumni authors on Saturday, June 7, at 10 AM in Axinn Center 229.
Our featured readers are writer and design director Tamara Hilmes (2010), science fiction writer EJ Kavounas (1990), novelist and editor Carolyn Kuebler (1990), poet Emily Lee Luan (2015), and writer and journalist Lauren Markham (2005).
This event is free and open to the public. Print and e-book subscriptions and a coveted selection of New England Review merch will be sold onsite. We hope to see you there!
Tamara Hilmes (2010) is a fiction writer and design director. She holds a BA from Middlebury in English, and an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2009, and began her career writing for The Middlebury Campus and Addison County Independent newspapers. Since graduating, she’s managed teams of writers and product designers at Foursquare, Vimeo, and now Spotify. She’s currently revising and seeking representation for “My Bias,” a literary K-pop novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
EJ Kavounas (1990) is a Los Angeles-based writer whose grounded brand of science fiction appears in Infinite Worlds and Amazing Stories, with his latest piece, “Vagabond,” forthcoming in Penumbric. An investment banker turned producer, his credits include the feature film Hero Mode (now streaming on STARZ) and the audio drama Broken Road, which can be found on Apple and Spotify. He earned a BA in English Literature from Middlebury College and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a graduate of the Odyssey and Bread Loaf workshops. With a penchant for outdoor adventures, you can catch him on the trails in the Santa Monica mountains or at https://www.recursor.tv/about-ej-kavounas.
Carolyn Kuebler (1990) was an English major with an Italian minor at Middlebury, and much later got her MFA at Bard College. She is the author of the novel Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, published in May 2024 by Melville House. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season” (Massachusetts Review) won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and an associate editor at Library Journal, and for the past eleven years she has been the editor of the New England Review, published here at Middlebury College.
Emily Lee Luan (2015) is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she has published her work in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University and on the teaching faculty of Adelphi’s low-residency MFA.
Lauren Markham (2005) is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, the California Book Award–shortlisted A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024), and the recently released Immemorial (2025).