2007 Faculty

William Kittredge farmed on the MC Ranch in southeastern Oregon until he was thirty-five, then taught creative writing at the University of Montana, where he retired as Regents Professor in 1997. His recent books are The Nature of Generosity, Southwestern Homelands, The Best Stories of William Kittredge, and The Willow Field, a novel.

Scott Russell Sanders, born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, studied in Rhode Island and Cambridge, England, before going on to become a Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University.  Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put, Hunting for Hope, and A Private History of Awe.  His writing has won the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, and the Lannan Literary Award.  He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.

David Shields’ two forthcoming books are The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008) and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2009).  He is the author of previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages: A Novel (winner of a PEN/Syndicated Fiction award).  A senior editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Believer.  He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA fellowships.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated in London, New York, and Dublin. Her most recent book of poetry, Domestic Violence, is forthcoming in 2007.  Other titles include Against Love Poetry, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2001; The Lost Land; An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987; In a Time of Violence; Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990; and The Journey and Other Poems.  Boland is also the author of a volume of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time; and co-editor, with Edward Hirsch, of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, forthcoming in fall 2007, and, with Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms.  Boland is the Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities at Stanford University and Lane Professor for the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

Michael Collier, director of the Conference, is the author of five books of poems: The Clasp and Other Poems; The Folded Heart; The Neighbor; The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and most recently, Dark Wild Realm. He is also co-editor, along with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, of A William Maxwell Portrait.  Collier has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two NEA fellowships, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are The Orchard, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pulitzer prize; Song, the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

James Longenbach is the author of three books of poems, Draft of a Letter, Fleet River, and Threshold.  In addition, he has written widely about modern and contemporary poetry: his prose books include The Resistance to Poetry, Stone Cottage, and The Art of the Poetic Line, forthcoming.  Longenbach teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at the University of Rochester, where he is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English.  In 2006 he was also the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

Steve Orlen has published six books of poetry, including The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005, Kisses, and This Particular Eternity. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, three NEA grants, and the George Dillon Memorial Award for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. 

Arthur Sze has published eight books of poetry, including Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, and The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese. He is the recipient of two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an American Book Award. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Domestic Work. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The recipient of two Pushcart prizes, her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003. Currently, she is associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and a novel, Inheritance, which won the PEN Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. Her fiction has appeared in  Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories.  A  former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Chang is the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the NEA. She has taught at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program.  She lives in Iowa City, where she is professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Robert Cohen is the author of three novels: Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, and The Organ Builder; and a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. His work has appeared in Harper's, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Antaeus, and other magazines. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Ribalow Prize. He teaches at Middlebury College.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and A Seahorse Year, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday, and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction from 1995-1997. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. She is currently completing her third novel, tentatively titled A Secret Life.

Percival Everett is the author of fifteen novels and three short story collections. Among these are Wounded, American Desert, Erasure, Glyph, and Damned If I Do. He has received the PEN USA Award for Fiction, American Academy Award for Literature, the Hurston/ Wright LEGACY Award, and the Hillsdale Award for Fiction. He is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Kevin McIlvoy is the author of four novels, A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, and Hyssop; and a story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico.  His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and Black Warrior Review.  He teaches in the MFA Program at New Mexico State University, where he is editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol magazine.  He is also a faculty member of the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Sigrid Nunez has published five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, and The Last of Her Kind. A new edition of Mitz, a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf's pet monkey, will be published in the spring, 2007.  Nunez has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She is also the recipient of a Berlin Prize Fellowship and of a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at Smith College, Columbia University, and the New School.

C.E. Poverman’s first collection of stories, The Black Velvet Girl won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction.  A second collection, Skin, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has had stories in Pushcart and O'Henry and has published four novels: Susan; Solomon's Daughter; My Father in Dreams; and On The Edge.  A Fulbright Scholar to India, he has been the recipient of an NEA Grant and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship. He is the former director of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where he teaches fiction and screenwriting.  He has just completed a new novel.

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels P.S., The Revisionist, and Out Of Time; and the short story collection Not A Free Show.  The novel P.S. was made into a feature film starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Marcia Gay Harden, and Gabriel Byrne; the screenplay was written by Helen Schulman & Dylan Kidd. Ms. Schulman co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child.  Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, Elle, Self, the New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and Tin House, among others. Presently the fiction coordinator at the Writing Program at The New School, she has taught at Emory, NYU, Bennington, Bard, and Columbia.   Her new novel, A Day at the Beach, is forthcoming in 2007.

Joanna Scott is the author of seven novels, including Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance, and two collections of short fiction, Everybody Loves Somebody, published in December, 2006, and Various Antidotes.  Her fiction and essays have appeared in Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Conjunctions, Southern Review, and other journals.  Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.  Awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Danzy Senna is the author of two novels, Caucasia and Symptomatic. Caucasia was a winner of the Book-of-the-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2002 she received the Whiting Writers’ Award, and in 2004 was a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is currently writing a nonfiction book about her father and the mystery of his origins. She lives in Los Angeles.

John Elder teaches English and environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives in the nearby village of Bristol with his wife Rita. His two most recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run, explore the meaning of Vermont’s landscape and environmental history for him as a teacher, writer, and householder.  He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing.

Edward P. Jones’ most recent collection of short stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was published in September 2006.  Other titles include Lost in the City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was short-listed for the National Book Award, and was the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award.  His first novel, The Known World, received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; in addition, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award, and the Lannan Literary award. Jones was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004. His stories have appeared in Essence, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo.  Jones has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University.

Susan Orlean's books include My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Ordinary People, Saturday Night, Red Sox and Blue Fish, and The Orchid Thief. The Orchid Thief has been made into the movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.  Orlean has written for a variety of publications, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy, the New York Times, Vogue, Outside, and the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992.  Currently, Orlean is writing a biography of Rin Tin Tin.  She lives in Boston and upstate New York with her husband and son.

Annick Smith is the author of Homestead; Big Bluestem: Journey into the Tallgrass; and In This We are Native. She co-edited, with William Kittredge, The Last Best Place, A Montana Anthology; edited Headwaters: Montana Writers on Water & Wilderness; and co-edited The Wide Open, a forthcoming collection of essays, stories, poems, and photographs.  Her essays and stories have appeared in Story, Audubon, Travel & Leisure, Orion, Modern Maturity, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, Circle of Women, Best of Outside, and most recently, Kiss Tomorrow Hello, Fresh Water, and Geography of the Heart.  Smith’s film credits include producing the feature film Heartland and co-producing A River Runs Through It.  Smith is writing a travel, memoir, and dog book tentatively titled Crossing the Plains With Bruno.

Jennifer Grotz, assistant director of the Conference, is the author of Cusp, which won the Katharine Nason Bakeless Prize and the Natalie Ornish Best First Book of Poetry Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and The Best American Poetry. Recipient of the 2007 New Writing Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she teaches in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Noreen Cargill is administrative manager of the Conference. She has worked with readers and writers in several venues, from library to bookstore to publishing house. Before coming to Bread Loaf in 2000, she directed Writers at the Champlain Mill, a community writing center offered by the The Book Rack & Children's Pages, an independent bookstore now located in Williston, Vermont.

Richard Abate, Literary Agent, International Creative Management
Miriam Altshuler, President, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency
Julie Barer, President, Barer Literary
Stuart Bernstein, Literary Agent, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists
Gary Clark, Development Director, Vermont Studio Center
Thom Didato, Editor and Publisher, Failbetter.com
Ted Genoways, Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
M.M.M. Hayes, Editor and Publisher, StoryQuarterly
Amy Holman, Literary Consultant
Carolyn Kuebler, Managing Editor, New England Review 
Alane Salierno Mason, Editor, W.W. Norton
Martha Rhodes, Director, Four Way Books
Denise Roy, Senior Editor, Simon & Schuster
Jeffrey Shotts, Senior Editor, Graywolf Press
Anjali Singh, Senior Editor, Houghton Mifflin
Carol Houck Smith, Editor-at-Large, W.W. Norton
Christina Ward, Literary Agent, Christina Ward Literary Agency
Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press
C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor, New England Review