July 20, 2026

Blu Mehari ’26 was close to ending up as an evil version of herself. 

She and the 600 members of her graduating class attended a Math and Science high school in Las Vegas. She competed in Quiz Bowl. She took no prisoners. 

“I cared about grades. I was competitive.” She believed back then, “studying is a thing you can win at.”

If she had attended any one of a number of other colleges, she believes that they would have reinforced that attitude and turned her into an unhappy person. 

If it were not for Bennington, “I would not have been forced to reconsider that [competitiveness],” she said. “Bennington is not about winning academically. It is essential that I got over that. It was destructive to me as a person.” 

She’s glad that, as a senior in high school, she received mail from Bennington. She remembers picking it up from the dining table at her house and thinking “that’s The Secret History school.” Author Donna Tartt graduated from Bennington in 1986 and used it as the basis for the fictional Hampden College in the genre-defining Dark Academia classic. 

Mehari loves the concrete, glass, and desert of her hometown, but she was eager to get away, too. “I wanted a smaller school. I wanted a place with weather. I wanted an academically intense, but more holistic, experience, one that was not just career focused. I wanted a school where people cared.”

She spent time on Bennington’s website. She saw the photos. 

“I was not committed, but I was charmed.” Then, she said, “Bennington talked me into it.” 

When she told her high school teachers that she had chosen Bennington, they questioned her. “What are you doing?” she laughed. But she justified her choice. “I am committed to ideas, and this was an idea. I am into what this place represents in my mind.” 

She arrived for the first day of first-year orientation without ever having visited.

“The first month at Bennington lasts 5 years,” she remembered. “There are  so many new experiences. It’s a weird liberal arts school with weird, passionate, beautiful people.” 

What she has discovered is a world in itself. 

“It’s a place of weird traditions. I love house culture. We are all in these communities. It’s made up of a million little things. Random events. Eurovision screenings….” she trailed off with a smile that indicates there are impossible-to-describe visions dancing in her head.

Mehari studied history, translation, and poetry. 

Her thesis in the Society, Culture, and Thought discipline was “Recollections of a Terrorist: Examining the  Mémoires de Bertrand Barère.” It is a work of historiography, the study of the writing of history, “how history is a lived event and how it is recorded.” 

She added, “All of my poetry is about history in some way.”  

Mehari will attend the Iowa Writers Workshop for an MFA in Poetry this fall. She is grateful to the people who convinced her that the future she is pursuing is possible. 

“I never would have thought of going to graduate school as a thing I could do without Michael Dumanis,” she said. “We had a two-hour Zoom call where he convinced me to just do it. It is crazy to imagine. Bennington is what made that possible.”

She is grateful for the opportunities she had to attend the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. It is a major North American organization that supports creative writing programs, authors, and literary arts centers. They host a massive annual conference that features hundreds of book fairs, panels, and readings. 

She also worked for a Field Work Term at Calligraph, a literary agency, and for The Bennington Review. 

“I saw what publishing looks like from the inside and what it looks like to be a literary agent,” she said, which is important for her future. “You have to be able to grab people with one sentence and understand how publishing works.” 

“I can’t believe I am leaving this place in 10 days,” she said during her interview in May. “I am a very nostalgic person, and I can’t imagine not being here.” 

“There’s a way in which Bennington helps you become a person who does things for their own sake and makes a life of what you love to do.”