The Bread Loaf School of English held its first summer session in 1920.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Tuesday, June 21, marks the start of the 92nd summer session of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English under the new directorship of Emily Bartels, professor of English at Rutgers University and a longtime faculty member and associate director at Bread Loaf. In addition to its original location in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the six-week residential summer graduate program takes place on three other campuses: St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.; the University of North Carolina at 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. The school’s mission is to create a diverse and dynamic learning community that fosters innovative, culturally responsive thinking, teaching and professional development.

This June, approximately 470 students from 42 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 50 faculty members from distinguished colleges and universities across the United States and United Kingdom.

Throughout the summer, many students also attend poetry and fiction readings, evening lectures and panels, and theatrical events. The Vermont campus will feature readings by Bread Loaf faculty, with a return visit from poet John Ashbery, a poetry reading by a new Bread Loaf faculty member, Tracy Smith, as well as the annual theatrical performance by the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, a group of Equity actors. This year’s production will be Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The annual Elizabeth Drew Memorial Lecture will be given by a former Bread Loaf faculty member and Woodrow Wilson Professor of English at Princeton, Valerie Smith. Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College Bill McKibben will speak early in the session. A special session for and by Bread Loaf alumni will feature readings by Tracy Winn and Rebecca Makkai. All events are open to the public. More information is available online.

Events at the other campuses will include poetry readings by Jimmy Santiago Baca at the Santa Fe campus and Natasha Tretheway at the Asheville campus, and a talk by Bread Loaf and Oxford faculty member Emma Smith at Oxford.

Bread Loaf faculty members have included such distinguished teachers and scholars as Shirley Brice Heath, Joseph Roach, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Elizabeth Drew, A. Bartlett Giamatti and Laurence Holland. Robert Frost first came to the school in 1921 and returned nearly every summer for 42 years.

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