Summer Reading Guide 2026

This year’s all-school read for students and faculty is Night Owl, the new poetry collection by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of The New York Times bestselling book, World of Wonders, and professor at the University of Mississippi. We chose the book on the recommendation of Dr. Katie Fleishman, our incoming Assistant Head of School for Academics. It is a collection of nocturnes – poems set in the dark after the world goes to bed – that wander through the natural world, family, love, memory, and amazement at being alive. You can dip into it, keep it by your bed or on your kitchen table, and let the poems drop into your summer wherever you may be.

Vladimir Nabokov said that a great writer must have “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Though we might often think of those as reversed – the poet as imaginative, the scientist as precise, for Nabokov, great writing was “a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic, a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.” We hope you find a few poems in this collection that make your spine tingle, and if you do, maybe also spare a moment to ask yourself why.