Robert Cohen, Professor of English and American Literatures, is a novelist who teaches both literature and creative writing courses. His books include Amateur Barbarians, Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, The Organ Builder, and a collection of short stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. Prior to teaching at Middlebury he taught at Harvard, Rice, the University of Houston, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He earned a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an MFA from Columbia. His stories and essays have appeared in Harpers, Paris Review, GQ, The Believer, and many other magazines, and his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace – Readers Digest Writers Award, a Ribalow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.