Before becoming an award-winning author, Samantha Hunt ’93 was a member of The Daredevil Club. As the youngest of six siblings, Hunt followed the brood on vast adventures through the apple orchard abutting their family’s “old, storied house” in Pound Ridge, N.Y., where their mother (a painter) and father (an editor) also nurtured their curiosity.
Big sister Amy ’91 led Hunt to another adventure, UVM, where Amy was a French major. Hunt was always writing, a passion that deepened and expanded through her time at UVM.
Hunt is celebrated for genre-bending novels like Mr. Splitfoot and The Seas; lauded short stories in The Dark Dark and posh publications like the New Yorker; works of nonfiction like The Unwritten Book; even a play. She is now finishing her next novel, The Tender.
“I think being the youngest of so many kids meant I often was not able to talk in order to sort out my thoughts,” she says, “so I always relied on writing as a way to think. I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t write.”
The UVM years made for good stories. They included drives in Hunt’s “old, totally not road-legal VW bug” with her two best friends, both of whom she met at UVM, Linda Krantz ’93 and John Morrisseau ’93.
As for classroom memories, Hunt has a trove of them, many involving professors, including David Huddle, Bill Davidson, Walter Brenneman, Charlotte Mehrtens, T. Alan Broughton, and Roxanne Lin. Professor Margaret Edward’s roast chicken dinners over a game of Dictionary also made a mark.
“I’ll never forget that generosity and true spirit of loving learning and literature.”
Hunt is a professor at Pratt Institute, where she has taught for over two decades. She splits her time between the Hudson Valley, N.Y., where her daughters go to school, and the Northeast Kingdom, Vt., where a retracted contingency of the Daredevil Club—she and two siblings—still gather.
“Right now,” Hunt adds, “at this time when our country is so misguided and there is so much suffering, I really love how writing does feel like a way I can connect and maybe even offer a different view for our future. I am thinking a lot these days about the might of the small, the power in the tiny. Whether that small action is one of resistance or art, it makes meaning.”
