Adrienne Raphel ’06
Adrienne Raphel graduated from the St. Johnsbury Academy in 2006 and was her class Valedictorian. Born in New Jersey but relocating to the Northeast Kingdom at the age of ten, she attended The Riverside School before SJA. During her time at the Academy, Adrienne participated in theater, including a number of musicals and one-act plays, track and field, Hilltones, Scholars Bowl, and the jazz band. Adrienne expressed great gratitude for her parents’ decision to move to Vermont: “My parents found the Academy online and felt it was exactly what they were looking for… a school with lots of diversity through the mix of public and private and in a magical area. They were able to work from home in the early 1990s, something unique for the time, so along with my brother Ben Raphel ‘05, we moved to the NEK. I am so grateful my parents moved to Vermont and that from age ten to my high school graduation I was able to grow up there.”
During her time at SJA, Adrienne took a multitude of English classes, and fondly remembers them. She said, “I need to give a huge shoutout to Jennifer Mackenzie, my former teacher and current friend. I learned so much from her and we still continue to be in contact, editing each other’s work and giving feedback. I also need to mention Graham Newell ‘33, whom I had for Latin. He was a gem of a teacher and taught me so much, including the history of Vermont!” Adrienne occasionally visits campus, speaking with English classes or as part of the Fireside Speaker Series.
After graduating from SJA, Adrienne attended Princeton University and earned an AB summa cum laude. She then went on to earn her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop and her PhD in English from Harvard University. She reported feeling the transition from SJA to college was relatively easy, saying, “I felt the Academy prepared me well for the rigor of higher education, not just academically, but also with my extracurriculars. I knew how to balance a lot on my plate and this made me feel confident and able to get involved with clubs in college. I also felt comfortable to try things out of my comfort zone, like a marine biology class in Bermuda, a skill I fostered while at SJA.”
When asked her biggest achievement, Adrienne said she hopes it is yet to come. She said, “Of what I have accomplished so far, I am really proud to have published books. My book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, came out in March of 2020. While this was challenging due to the world shutting down, it provided an anchor during the start of the pandemic where I was focused on something positive.” Adrienne has also published the poetry collections What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia, which was just published in the fall of 2022. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, the Drift, the New Republic, and many other publications. In addition to writing, editing, and publishing, Adrienne also teaches first-year writing classes at Princeton University.
A piece of advice she would give current SJA students? Adrienne said, “If you aren’t already, take a career and technical education (CTE) class, take something practical. I wish I had taken advantage of the amazing classes the Academy offers, like Intro to Automotive Technology or Intro to Culinary Arts. The Academy has so many options inside and outside of the classroom—don’t forget to take advantage of them.”