MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Tuesday, June 24, marks the beginning of the 89th summer session of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. In addition to its central location at its campus outside Middlebury in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the six-week summer graduate program takes place on three other campuses: St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the University of North Carolina in Asheville; and Lincoln College at the University of Oxford in England.

Since 1920, the Bread Loaf School of English has offered an array of graduate courses in literature, the teaching of writing, creative writing and theater arts. This June, approximately 500 students from 41 states and 15 countries, many of them secondary school teachers, will work toward a Master of Arts or Master of Letters degree while studying with 54 faculty members from distinguished colleges and universities throughout the United States and United Kingdom.

Many students also attend poetry and fiction readings, evening lectures and panels, and numerous theater and music performances throughout the summer. The Vermont campus will feature readings by Bread Loaf faculty Paul Muldoon and celebrated poet John Ashbery, as well as the annual theatrical performance by the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, a group of Equity actors. This year’s major production will be Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” All events are open to the public. For more information, visit http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/blse/.

The other campuses feature similar events, such as a reading by former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins at the New Mexico campus and theatrical performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company for students attending the Oxford campus.

Throughout the year, many students stay connected by participating in BreadNet, a computer network and virtual community of teachers and learners who have participated in the Bread Loaf School of English.

During the last 88 years Bread Loaf faculty members have included such distinguished teachers and scholars as Harold Bloom, James Britton, Richard Brodhead, Elizabeth Drew, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Nancy Martin, as well as Robert Frost, who first came to the school in 1921 and returned nearly every summer for 42 years. Middlebury College still owns and maintains the nearby Robert Frost homestead, the Homer Noble Farmhouse, as a National Historic Site.

For more information about the Bread Loaf School of English, contact the administrative offices at 802-443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.