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Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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Headshot of Shelby Van Pelt.
Mon, September 28, 2026
Dinner Program

Misanthropic Octopus Takes Hollywood: How a Debut Novelist Transformed a Spark of Imagination into a Netflix Hit
Shelby Van Pelt ‘02

Join The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies in featuring one of the most imaginative authors that is celebrated today.  Why does one imagine an octopus?  Van Pelt doesn’t have a definitive answer to that question, but she’s thought about it plenty. In true CMC fashion, she contemplates society’s marketplaces: in this case, for imagination and curiosity. In this talk, she offers her candid take on how a fictional octopus might fill a whimsy-void that we don’t know we’re missing. 

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Shelby Van Pelt (PPE ’02) is a bestselling author and Emmy-nominated producer. Her debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, has sold five million copies worldwide and been translated into over forty languages. Collectively, it’s spent over two years on New York Times bestseller lists. In May 2026, Netflix released a film adaptation, executive produced by Van Pelt and starring Sally Field; it topped streaming charts for weeks.

Prior to her creative career, Van Pelt worked in Litigation Consulting, a field which she found interesting mostly for its dramatic narratives and the untold stories often unearthed by searching boxes of documents. As a full-time fiction writer, she now splits her time between the Chicago suburbs and northwest Montana.

This program is a part of the Gould Center's Celebration of Coeducation Speaker Series.

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

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