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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Acclaimed author Ted Conover delivers talk “Sending Myself to Prison”

Author and journalist Ted Conover will give a talk today at 4:30 p.m. in Dana Auditorium entitled “Sending Myself to Prison (and Other Places I was Not Invited).” Cloe Shasha ’11 originally invited Conover to the College to speak at the TEDx event on Oct. 2, but he was in a minor accident and could not visit campus that day. Today’s rescheduled venue will allow Conover more time to speak than the TEDx talk would have.

“He’s a really great storyteller,” said Shasha. “I think his books would appeal to Middlebury students because they feature adventure, exploration, travel and a really strong narrative.”

Conover is the author of five books of narrative nonfiction, most recently The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. In 2000, he published Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which chronicles his experiences working for 10 months as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing prison and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book went on to win the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

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Conover has previously written about his experiences traveling in freight railroads across the western United States with migratory workers and homeless individuals; traveling with Mexican nationals throughout Mexico and across the Mexico-U.S. border three times; and working various jobs in Aspen, Colo., while studying the culture of that city.

Conover is a distinguished writer-in-residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. He also is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Magazine, Travel + Leisure, among others.


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