Acclaimed poet, longtime New Yorker contributor and Burlington native Dan Chiasson will discuss his symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician. Chiasson had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, and in this book he shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time.

Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, defied a corrupt Democratic machine to find his coalition among Burlington’s often feuding communities: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose grandparents and great-grandparents—including Chiasson’s own—had worked in the mills; the puppeteers, hippies, and NYC transplants who’d moved to Vermont to find land and authenticity; the anti-nukers, activist nuns, baseball fans, developers, cops, and small businessmen like Ben and Jerry, who became Ben & Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington Is Not for Sale” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets plowed but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

“The more I read of Dan Chiasson’s book, the more moved I was by how absolutely unwavering Bernie’s message has been across the many decades of his career.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, on creating the cover art for Bernie for Burlington

“This is a book we need right now—a big, lovingly-woven, Whitmanesque wickerwork of grievances and glories, home truths and triumphs, about a Brooklyn kid and the city on the shore of Lake Champlain where he shaped his compassionate cause. Read it and you’ll never think about local politics the same way again.” —Nicholson Baker

DAN CHIASSON is the author of five books of poetry, including Bicentennial (2014) and The Math Campers (2020), and a book of literary criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Chiasson is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.