Author: Dan Chiasson

It was a pleasure to work last summer with Cheynie Singleton ‘26 on the production phase of my book Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Cheynie read the entire book, 900 pages in manuscript, and gave me detailed feedback about its structure and composition. It was great to entrust her with those two giant spiral bound piles of writing, and gratifying to have her helpful, careful responses.

I asked Cheynie to check certain facts in my book. This was harder to do than one would expect, because of the nature of many of the “facts” I used to reconstruct Sanders’s political rise. Many of the stories in the book were based on personal recollections of Bernie as a young person and emerging political force; these could only be tracked back to their source, not checked in the conventional sense of “fact checking.” Cheynie did, however, check the “public facts” in the narrative–the date of the Kent State shooting, the end of the Vietnam War, whether Barre, Vermont is a town or a city, this kind of thing–and did so with great skill and efficiency.

Cheynie also answered an SOS call. For this I will always be grateful. In May of last year, Knopf decided that they would promote my book as a feature title for the Spring of 2026. I was very happy to earn the publisher’s confidence, but suddenly our production schedule was sped up significantly. With only a few days’ notice, Cheynie filled in all of the gaps in my notes (details I’d pinned for later in the process, imagining that I would have several months to address them!). Over the course of a week or so, Cheynie tracked down all the missing sources in old newspapers and video clips, and produced a spotless document that got me out of a major jam.

I worked with several students during the five years I researched and wrote Bernie for Burlington, but Cheynie’s impact was the most significant of all. Thanks to TSSL and Cheynie, my book–which is very much a capital S Story of capital T Transformation–will appear on February 3, 2026, all bundled up and ready to face a Vermont winter.