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• Friday Nights at Westminster 2024-2025

  Please join us for Friday Nights at Westminster, a series of readings and concerts held at Westminster School during the 2024-2025 academic year on selected Friday nights, (occasionally on other nights of the week).

   

  The events begin at 7 p.m. and are free and open to members of the public. Events are held in either the Westminster Centennial Center or the Gund Reading Room of the school’s Armour Academic Center. We will let you know where each event will be held once the decision is made. Parking is available in the parking lot adjacent to Armour.

  Friday, Oct. 11
  Nick Fuller Googins 

  
  Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novel, The Great Transition (Atria Books). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine, and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, as well as the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States.
  
  Friday, Dec. 13
  Daniel Donaghy 

  
  

  Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which was named co-winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections are Start with the Trouble (University of Arkansas Press, 2009), winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence and a Finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and Streetfighting (BkMk Press, 2005), a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. He earned a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins College (now University), an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Donaghy was awarded the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and a 2019 Artist Fellowship by the Connecticut Office of the Arts. He is Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he edits Here: a poetry journal with his students, and serves as Poet Laureate of Windham, CT. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, PA, which has inspired many of his poems.

  
  

  Friday, Jan. 24
  Sarah Larson 
  
  

  Sarah Larson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, grew up in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and attended Renbrook, Loomis Chaffee, and the University of Massachusetts. She joined The New Yorker’s staff as a copy editor in 2001 and became a full-time writer in 2013. She has written features, profiles, criticism, Talk of the Town pieces, and Web posts on a wide range of cultural subjects including theatre, pop music, pickleball, podcasts, TV, books, cartoons, political rallies, Olympic bobsledding, the right way to spell different kinds of laughter, and the joy of eavesdropping. She appears regularly on the magazine’s nationally syndicated NPR show, “The New Yorker Radio Hour."
  
  

  Friday, April 25
  Sophfronia Scott

  
  

  Sophfronia Scott grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with author Toni Morrison. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She began her career as an award-winning magazine journalist for Time, where she co-authored the groundbreaking cover story “Twentysomething,” the first study identifying the demographic group known as Generation X, and People. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004 Sophfronia was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.”

  
  

  Her latest book is The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton. Sophfronia’s other books include Unforgivable Love, Love’s Long Line, Doing Business By the Book, and This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with her son Tain. Her essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Yankee Magazine, The Christian Century, North American Review, NewYorkTimes.com, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essays “Hope On Any Given Day,” “The Legs On Which I Move,” and “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” are listed among the Notables in the Best American Essays series. 

  
  

  Sophfronia is the recipient of a 2020 Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.  She has taught at Regis University’s Mile High MFA and Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s also delivered craft talks and held workshops at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Currently Sophfronia is the founding director of Alma College’s MFA in Creative Writing, a low-residency graduate program based in Alma, Michigan. She lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut where she continues to fight a losing battle against the weeds in her flower beds.