See archived 2011-2012 student achievements here.
Sarah Nichols Dille (MA '04) has received the Teacher of the Year for Austin ISD, the public school district in Austin, TX, composed of over 118 campuses.
Terri Vest (MA '84; MLitt '95) is the recipient of an America Achieves Fellowship. As such, she attended several sessions of Education Nation had an opportunity to speak to a number of policy-makers including Secretary of Education Duncan. Vest is also in her second term on the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards board of Directors.
Heidi Boisvert (MA '00), a PhD candidate in Rensselaer's Department of the Arts, directed the premiere of "[radical] signs of life," a performance featuring the use of biotechnology to integrate music and images generated from networked dancers. Heidi is a new media artist and game designer who worked with a team of international artists on the project.
Lucille Rossbach (MA '02) has edited Returning the Arts to Language Arts (Royal Fireworks Press, 2013), a collection of reflections on best practices from teachers in the Colorado chapter of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network.
Bread Loaf senior Holly Spinelli, member of BLTN and a recipient of the prestigious Esperanza Fellowship, has written an article in the Huffington Post about her experience in a master class with Gloria Steinem as a fellow in Sam Swope's Academy for Teachers.
Lois Kim (attended '92) has been named the Texas Book Festival’s executive director, responsible for managing staff, programs, operations, external relations, and resource development. Kim is currently the associate director of University Extension at the University of Texas at Austin.
Janet Atkins (MA '97, MLitt '08, BLTN member) has been named a finalist in the 2013 Sidney Lanier Award Poetry Competition for her poem "Retrospective on an Empty Nest."
Janet Atkins (MA '97, MLitt '08, BLTN member) published her poem "Saturday Visitation" in the English Journal (Vol. 102, No. 4, March 2013). Janet is a National Board certified teacher at the Wade Hampton High School in South Carolina.
Novelist and Middlebury College writer-in-residence Julia Alvarez's (attended '79 & '80) piece, "Stories to Steer By," appears in the December 2012/January 2013 edition of The Progressive. She was also interviewed on The Bob Edwards Show on April 11, 2013.
Look for two Bread Loaf names in the March 25th edition of The New Yorker: Sam Swope's Academy for Teachers recently hosted a master class with Gloria Steinem for nominated fellows, including City-as-School teacher Holly Spinelli. Rebecca Mead's Talk of the Town article describes some of the conversation that took place on the seminar's topic of feminism in the classroom.
Evelyn Begody (current student) reports that five students at the Window Rock High School where she teaches English in Fort Defiance, Arizona have been selected as Gates Millenium Scholarship Finalists.
Christopher Gilbert (MA '10) has recently been published in The Washington Post and two issues of the NCTE's English Journal.
Daniel Picker (MA '92) has published his first book of poetry, Steep Stony Road (Viral Cat Press, July 2012). The book includes the poem "River Goddess,"winner of The Dudley Review Poetry Prize of Harvard University. Frost scholars John Elder (with whom Mr. Picker studied at Bread Loaf) and Seamus Heaney praise the book. Signed copies are available from the poet through Daniel3608033@yahoo.com.
Heather Adams (MA '08) has been awarded the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Dissertation Award for "Secrets and Silences: Rhetorics of Unwed Pregnancy Since 1960." Heather is a 2012 graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where Bread Loaf professor Cheryl Glenn was her dissertation advisor.
Martha Brennan (current) and Rebecca Slagle (MA ‘05) have been named winners of the 2012 NCTE/SLATE Intellectual Freedom Award, given in recognition of those who show courage in advancing the cause of intellectual freedom or fighting censorship.
Kurt Caswell (MA ‘98) chronicles his walking journeys in Grand Gulch, Utah in "A Short Walk in Anasazi Country," published in the inaugural issue of Earthlines magazine.
Elizabeth Neely Clauser (MA ‘04) received a Fulbright grant to Brazil to sponsor the last chapter of her dissertation research for her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of North Texas on "Elizabeth Bishop in Brasil: An Ongoing Acculturation."
Cathy Eaton (current) has a fiction website at www.cathyeatonfiction.com, where her first collection of short stories is now available. Her story “Raggedy Slipper” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.
Lorena German (current) has written an account of her experiences as both a student and a teacher at Lawrence High School in the May issue of The Advocate, a journal of the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers.
Nagihan Haliloğlu's (MA '01) book, Narrating from the Margins: Self-Representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2011) has been reviewed by Lee Garver of Butler University in the current edition of Postcolonial Text.
Kurt Heinzelman, (MA ‘72) Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, this year published his third book of poems, The Names They Found There (Pecan Grove Press, 2011), cited by Poetry International as one of the "Notable Poetry Books of the Year."
Sushma Joshi's (MA '05) play, I Killed My Best Friend's Father, was read as part of the Kali Talkback Festival of staged readings at the Arcola Theatre in London on December 8, 2012. The play deals with the struggle of two teenaged girls to maintain their friendship after being displaced by the conflict in Nepal.
Sørina Higgins, (MA ‘07) adjunct professor of English at Lehigh Carbon Community College, published her first full-length book of poetry in February, entitled Caduceus (David Robert Books, 2012). See more at http://www.iambicadmonit.com/.
Cynthia Huntington,(MA '83) Professor of English at Dartmouth College and former New Hampshire State Poet Laureate, has published her fourth book of poems, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012). The book, which focuses on the drama of the 1960s, was included as an "Editor's Selection" in the press’s Crab Orchard Poetry Series.
Eileen (Rosenbaum) Landay (MA ‘85), Adjunct Senior Lecturer, co-founder and Faculty Director of the ArtsLiteracy Project, and retired Clinical Professor of English Education at Brown University, has published Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts (Harvard Education Press, 2012) with Kurt Wootton.
Charles Lear (MA '03), director, actor, and playwright, has published Post-Apocalyptic Macbeth and the Girls (CreateSpace, August 2012), an accounting of his rooftop production of Macbeth in Brooklyn.
Robin Lehleitner (current) presented "Bridging the Gap: Helping Non-elite Students Create Relationships with Literature” at the Transitions and Transactions: Literature Pedagogy in Community Colleges Conference at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, in April 2012. Robin teaches English and Creative Writing at Berkshire Community College and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Andrew Mahlstedt (MA '06) has successfully completed his PhD in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Rebecca Makkai (MA '04), novelist, has published the article "Mapping a Novel" in the November 30, 2012 edition of the Wall Street Journal. In the article, she relates her experience blueprinting the haunted house in her upcoming novel.
Renee Moore (MA '97; BLTN member) gave the keynote speech at the Powerful Learning Practice conference PLP Live - Inspire. Collaborate. Shift. on September 28th in Philadelphia.
Flor Mota (current), who received a Write to Change grant to create a writing center at McCallum High School in Austin, Texas, has now received that school's Teacher of the Year award.
Charlene Ortuno (current; BLTN member), a teacher at iPrep Academy in Miami, Florida, linked her students with the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum in Miami Beach to design and create game-based curriculum on democracy.
See the resulting website Teen Thoughts on Democracy and the accompanying book.
Julie Porter,(MA ‘06) who was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, received a Ph.D. in education from Columbia University in May, 2012.
Myra Shapiro (MA '73) has published a new book of poems entitled 12 Floors Above Earth (Antrim House, 2012). Described by Tony Hoagland as "a wonderfully alert and honest collection of poems," the work draws upon Myra's Jewish background, her love of family, and her rejection of convention.
Frank Reetz (MA '10) has edited Gathering Conifer's Stories Project, a collection of stories written by Colorado youth about the traditions, people and history of their communities.
Lillian Reeves, (BL ‘07) doctoral student in Language and Literacy at the University of South Carolina-Columbia and member of the BLTN Advisory Board, has published (with A.J. Lachuk and D. DeFord) “The Things They Carried: 100 Years of Literacy Learning and Scholarship,” a review of the book Reclaiming Reading: Teachers, Students, and Researchers Regaining Spaces for Thinking and Action, edited by J.R. Meyer and K.F. Whitmore, in Language Arts (2012).
Dan Sharkovitz (MA '90) published the article "On Anarchy and the Teaching of English" in the Fall 2012 issue of The Leaflet, the professional journal of the New England Association of Teachers of English.
Karra Shimabukuro (MA '10) presented papers entitled "More Grimm Than We Remember: Our New Interest in Fairy Tales and Its Significance" at Popular/American Culture Association in the South (September 2012) and "The Modern Day Bogeymen Freddy Krueger's Folkloric Roots" for the Modern Day Fairy Tale in Film and Television panel at SAMLA (November 2012).
Lee (Skip) Smith (MA ’80), who teaches Advanced Fiction Writing at Champlain College in Burlington, published a collection of short stories entitled Views Cost Extra (Fomite Press, 2011).
See more at http://fomitepress.com/
Nina Sokol (current) published her poems "Trill" in Ardent: A journal of Poetry and Art (Dec. 2011) and “Everyday Betrayal” in the e-zine Nite Writers International Literary Arts Journal . Nina’s Danish-to-English translation of Twenty Minutes After Death, a play by Thomas Markmann, was selected by the Scandinavian American Theater Company to be read in their "Contemporary Scandinavian Reading Series" at Scandinavia House in Manhattan.
Bill Sowder (MA '89) has published "Keeping the Teacher in Teaching" in English Leadership Quarterly (October 2012). Bill, who retired from public teaching and supervising in 2010, now teaches at The College of New Jersey.
Holly Spinelli presented a workshop on 'Fearless Writing' at the 2012 Performing the World Conference in New York City on October 7th. The conference is attended by educators, performers, artists, and students from around the world.
Holly Spinelli (current) has been nominated as a Fellow in the Academy for Teachers, the brainchild of Bread Loaf faculty member Sam Swope.
Emily Stigliani (current) is attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism on a graduate fellowship (2011-13).
Mike Sunderland (current) and his students at Red Cloud High School were featured in the August 2012 National Geographic cover story about the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The storytelling collaboration between Mike’s students and National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey can be viewed here.
Stephanie Tam, one of the three inaugural Princeton/Bread Loaf Fellows at the Oxford campus last summer, has been named one of the two recipients of the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship at Princeton University, where she is a member of the class of 2013. As a Sachs Scholar, Stephanie will be studying postcolonial and world literatures at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Read more here.
Mohsin Tejani (MA '01), in collaboration with Andover Bread Loaf (ABL), has established the Karachi School of Writing in Pakistan. The School of Writing, which functions as a comprehensive community writing center, addresses the literacy needs of students, professionals, and organizations, using the arts, technology, and other resources to develop participants' 21st-century literacy abilities.
Laura Van Der Ploeg (attended '97; member BLTN) has published Literacy for a Better World: The Promise of Teaching in Diverse Classrooms (Teacher's Press, 2012). The book explores socially-just teaching practice through a combination of literacy research and pedagogy.
David Wandera (MA ‘08 and current MLitt student) has been awarded a Martha King Scholarship Award for his continued doctoral study in the College of Education and Human Ecology Scholarship at Ohio State University for the 2012-13 academic year.
Monica Weis (SSJ, MA '73), Professor of English and Director of the MA in Liberal Studies program at Nazareth College, published her second book, The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton (University Press of Kentucky, 2011) and spent the fall teaching American literature at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary, as a Fulbright Visiting Professor.