Helen “Leni” Vradelis ’07 recently won the New England Poetry Club’s Ruth Berrien Fox Award. She read her award-winning poem, “Post Ilium,” to the club’s members at Longfellow Garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The poem is Odysseus talking to Helen of Troy after the war,” says Leni, who wrote the piece in a creative writing class at Milton.
“I read everything. I read all the time,” Leni says. “I like words.” Her favorite authors are as varied as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Zadie Smith, Garrison Keillor, Sylvia Plath and William Makepiece Thackeray, she says.
The New England Poetry Club was founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Conrad Aiken. The club sponsors the oldest poetry reading series in the country.
Leni is also a contributor to Magus-Mabus, Milton’s literary magazine. The magazine has its roots in the Academy’s Girls’ School publication, The Magus, and the Boys’ School publications, The Orange and Blue, and The Lit, which eventually merged with the girls’ publication to become Magus-Mabus by the early 1970s.
