Bread Loaf School of English begins summer sessions June 23

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Tuesday, June 23, marks the start of the 90th summer session of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in the Green Mountains of Vermont. In addition to its original location, the six-week summer graduate program takes place on three other campuses: St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.; 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 46 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.

Also this month, more than 250 alumni of the Bread Loaf School of English will return to the Vermont campus to celebrate the 90th anniversary on June 20-21.

Throughout the summer, many students attend poetry and fiction readings, evening lectures and panels, and numerous theater and music performances. The Vermont campus will feature readings by Bread Loaf faculty and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon and former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, as well as the annual theatrical performance by the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, a group of Equity actors. This year’s production will be “The Changeling” by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. All events are open to the public. More information is available here. 

The other campuses will feature similar events, such as a reading by award-winning novelist Leslie Marmon Silko at the New Mexico campus and theatrical performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company for students attending Oxford.

Over the 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.