Middlebury College

Lewis Robinson is an American author. His first book, Officer Friendly and Other Stories, was published by HarperCollins in 2003. A graduate of... Middlebury College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Robinson currently lives in Andover, Massachusetts as the writer-in-residence of Phillips Academy. Lewis Robinson was born in Natick, Massachusetts, and grew up in Maine. He attended Middlebury College and later, the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow and winner of the Glenn Schaeffer Award. In the past, Robinson has taught a creative writing course at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, a two-week intensive creative writing summer program for talented high school students. He currently works as the Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy Andover, teaching and writing. Robinson's first collection, Officer Friendly and Other Stories , won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Additionally, he has written for Sports Illustrated and The Boston Globe. His short stories have appeared in various publications, including Tin House, Open City Magazine, Shout, The Missouri Review, as well as being featured on the NPR program Selected Shorts.
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Shawn Ryan is a writer, and the creator of the FX Networks series The Shield and the Fox TV series The Chicago Code. He graduated from Middlebury... College and is married to actress Cathy Cahlin Ryan, who starred on The Shield. They have two children. Ryan got his start in television as a staff writer on the show Nash Bridges and served as a writer/producer on Angel before creating and acting as Head Writer on The Shield. He was partnered with David Mamet to serve as showrunner for The Unit. Ryan was set to executive produce Confessions of a Contractor, a 2009 CBS television pilot based on Richard Murphy's book of the same name. The story centres on a successful L.A. contractor who becomes involved with two of his female clients. The production was put on hold when casting contingencies could not be met. He was the show runner for season 2 of Fox's Lie to Me. He was the show runner and executive producer of FX's Terriers. He created the crime drama The Chicago Code. He was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series in 2002 , and a Humanitas Prize in 1998.
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Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York of Dominican descent, she spent the first ten years of her... childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country. Alvarez rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , In the Time of the Butterflies , and Yo! . Her publications as a poet include Homecoming and The Woman I Kept to Myself , and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare . Many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers and she has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale. Many of Alvarez's works are influenced by her experiences as a Dominican in the United States, and focus heavily on issues of assimilation and identity. Her cultural upbringing as both a Dominican and an American is evident in the combination of personal and political tone in her writing.
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