Bread Loaf/New Mexico: A Campus Different
For nineteen of its twenty-five summers, Bread Loaf has been housed in New Mexico at the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College.
Perched just above that “City Different” in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the campus’s distinctive earthy buildings and brick courtyards are punctuated by piñon trees and crowned by vast blue skies. From 1996-2000, Bread Loaf relocated to the Native American Preparatory School (NAPS) in Rowe, New Mexico - a school set among 1600 acres of mountains along the winding Pecos River in Rowe, providing instruction in Native American arts, literature, and history within its rigorous college preparatory curriculum. In 2001, Bread Loaf moved again, to the Institute of American Indian Arts (the only four-year degree fine arts institution in the nation devoted to contemporary Native American and Alaska Native arts) for one summer before returning to St. John’s College in 2002.
Bread Loaf/New Mexico’s connection to the converging cultures of the locale, with a distinctive curricular emphasis on Native American, Latino/a, and Southwestern literature, has remained a hallmark of the program across all three locations. To complement their studies, Bread Loaf/New Mexico students have embarked on field trips to missions, Native ruins, and other sites of historic importance; trekked through lands filled with geological interest; absorbed the colors, flavors, and sounds of local markets, arts, and music; and engaged with speakers and readers such as Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Billy Collins, and Simon Ortiz.