The Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is an author's conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont. Founded in 1926, it has been called by The New Yorker "the oldest and most prestigious writers' conference in the country." [1] Bread Loaf is a program of Middlebury College and at its inception was closely associated with Robert Frost, who lived in nearby Ripton and attended a total of 29 sessions.
Every other day for 10 days, the 220 participants attend 10-person workshops, where their writing is assessed by the faculty and others in the workshop, including Scholars and Fellows. Numerous readings, craft classes, events, and agent meetings are also included. Michael Collier, a poet and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and director of the conference, told Seven Days newspaper of Vermont the event should not be confused with the more leisurely model of a writers' retreat. It's "designed for learning rather than for on-site writing." USA Today in an article on summer literary gatherings, said of Bread Loaf, "There is nowhere in America where you can hear more great writers reading more great work in such a short space of time." Seven Days notes that participants are warned to pace themselves to avoid exhaustion. [2]
According to Seven Days , the likelihood of general admission to Bread Loaf (in 2005) stood at about 17 percent, given a total applicant pool of 1,500. Of those accepted, 170 students pay full fare. These people are called Contributors (because they contribute to the workshops with their writing). The New Yorker wrote that the most coveted scholarships to Bread Loaf are the 25 "Waiterships", in which promising writers earn their keep by serving three meals a day to the paying guests. Besides the Waiterships, applicants who have been published can try for tuition scholarships, and those with a published book can become Bread Loaf Teaching Fellows. Waiters, Tuition Scholars, and Fellows are given the opportunity to give public readings. [3]
Noted authors who have been associated with the conference over the years include Richard Wright, James Brown, John Ciardi, Bernard DeVoto, Robert Frost, John Gardner, Richard Gehman, Donald Hall, John Irving, Shirley Jackson, Barry Lopez, Robie Macauley, George R.R. Martin, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Linda Pastan, May Sarton, Anne Sexton, Eudora Welty, Stanley Elkin, Tim O'Brien and Richard Yates. [4]
In the 1960s the conference director was John Ciardi, who lost the support of the executives (particularly that of assistant director Paul Cubeta, who agitated strongly for increased salaries). Cubeta was replaced by Edward A. "Sandy" Martin in 1965. Dissent from the participants continued to grow over the next few years as pressure increased to abandon the principles of earned hierarchy and adopt more egalitarian structures and behaviours. [5]
Recent Faculty have included Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Linda Bierds, Robert Boswell, Lan Samantha Chang, Ted Conover, Mark Doty, Percival Everett, Lynn Freed, Linda Gregerson, Patricia Hampl, Edward Hirsch, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, William Kittredge, Rebecca Makkai, Antonya Nelson, Carl Phillips, Natasha Trethewey, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Daniel Wallace, and Dean Young. [4]
The Conference is currently administered by director Jennifer Grotz [6] and assistant director, Lauren Francis-Sharma.
Recent Fellows at the Conference have included Christopher Castellani, Geri Doran, Thomas Sayers Ellis, John Engels, Ilya Kaminsky, Suji Kwock Kim, Naeem Murr, Peter Orner, Eric Puchner, Richard Siken, Monique Truong, Vendela Vida, Tiphanie Yanique and C. Dale Young.
Well-known recipients of waiterships have included Julia Alvarez, Amanda Davis, Samuel R. Delany, [7] Carolyn Forche, Jonathan Galassi, Jean Kwok, Justin Torres, Tama Janowitz, Antonya Nelson, Tiphanie Yanique and Joy Williams.
Beginning with the 2020 conference, the new director, Jen Grotz, discontinued this form of scholarship, redirecting funds to scholarships without work requirements as a more generous way of supporting the same participants. This decision considered the fact that some felt that the "waiterships" though well respected created a sense of racist distinction (in recent years many waiters have been writers of color). There was a recognition that the meal service role unintentionally created the perception that some scholarship recipients were being categorized as servants. [8]
In the 2006 episode "Moe'N'a Lisa" of the animated sitcom The Simpsons , some of the plot takes place at the "Wordloaf Literary Conference" in Vermont, based on Bread Loaf. The episode features the authors Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal, all voice acting as themselves.
Ripton is a town in Addison County, Vermont, United States. The population was 739 at the 2020 census.
John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio.
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, Middlebury was the first operating college or university in Vermont.
Founded in 1969 the Community of Writers is a writers' conference held each summer in Olympic Valley, California. The Community of Writers is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and has a governing Board of Directors.
Jay Parini is an American writer and academic. He is known for novels, poetry, biography, screenplays and criticism. He has published novels about Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, Herman Melville, and a novelized memoir about his road trip with Jorge Luis Borges.
The New England Review is an American quarterly literary magazine published by Middlebury College. It was established in 1978 by Sydney Lea and Jay Parini. From 1982 till 1990, the magazine was named New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly, reverting to its original name in 1991. It publishes poetry, fiction, translations, and nonfiction.
Craig Arnold was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
Bret Lott is the New York Times author and professor of English at the College of Charleston. He is Crazyhorse magazine's nonfiction editor and leads a study abroad program every summer to Spoleto, Italy.
Paul Mariani is an American poet and is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College.
Jennifer Grotz is an American poet and translator who teaches English, creative writing, and literary translation at the University of Rochester, where she is Professor of English. In 2017 she was named the seventh director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Stacie Cassarino is an American poet, educator, editor, and mother. She is the author of two collections of poems, Each Luminous Thing and Zero at the Bone, and a monograph, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature.
April Ossmann is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music, and has had her poems published in many literary journals including Harvard Review,Hayden’s Ferry Review,Puerto del Sol,Seneca Review,Passages North,Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Her awards include a 2000 Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award. Her essays have been published in Poets & Writers, and by the Poetry Foundation.
John Engels was an American poet.
Matthew T. Dickerson is an American academic working as a professor of computer science at Middlebury College in Vermont. A scholar of J. R. R. Tolkien's literary work and the Inklings, Dickerson is by his own account a novelist, newspaper columnist, blues musician, historian of music, fly fisherman, maple sugar farmer, and beekeeper.
Robert Pack was an American poet and critic, and Distinguished Senior Professor in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana - Missoula. For thirty-four years he taught at Middlebury College and from 1973 to 1995 served as director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and criticism. Pack has been called, by Harold Bloom, an heir to Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and has himself published a volume of admiring essays on Frost's poetry. He has co-edited several books with Jay Parini, including Writers on Writing: A Breadloaf Anthology.
Tiphanie Yanique from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Caribbean American fiction writer, poet and essayist who lives in New York. In 2010 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 Under 35" honoree. She also teaches creative writing, currently based at Emory University.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
David Haward Bain is an American writer of nonfiction, a lecturer, an editor, and was a longtime instructor in literature and creative writing at Middlebury College. Bain has been affiliated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference since 1980. He is also a lifelong musician. Bain is primarily known for his work of narrative history, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad; a historical travel memoir, The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Roads, Rails, and the Urge to Go West; and an earlier braided historical/travel work, Sitting In Darkness: Americans in the Philippines. He is a fellow in the Society of American Historians.