July 30, 1999
Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 1999 Schedule of Lectures and Readings
All readings and lectures take place in the Little Theatre on the Middlebury College Bread Loaf mountain campus in Ripton, Vt., on Route 125. They are free and open to the public.
Morning lectures by Bread Loaf faculty will cover a variety of topics. In the afternoons and evenings, Bread Loaf faculty, fellows and special guests will present readings from their own works.
Morning Lecturers (starting Aug. 12, at 9 a.m.):
Patricia Hampl, “Other People’s Secrets: Privacy, History and the First Personal Voice” - Aug. 12
Baharati Mukherjee, “The American Writer as ‘Rooted Cosmopolite’ ” - Aug. 13
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Pattern and Variations” - Aug. 14
Clark Blaise, “Passion and the Nonfiction Subject” - Aug. 16
Edward Hirsch, “The Duende” - Aug. 17
Thomas Mallon, “Photography and Historical Fiction” - Aug. 18
Carl Phillips, “True Confession: The Lessons of George Herbert” - Aug. 19
James Longenbach, “Life is but a Dream: Disjunction in Poetry” - Aug. 20
Toi Derricotte, “Writing the Black Notebooks: Transforming Buried Memories into Art” - Aug. 21
Afternoon readings (starting Aug. 12, at 4:15 p.m.):
Readings by special guests:
Michael S. Harper and Francine Prose - Aug. 12.
Michael Harper has published ten books of poetry, including Nightmare Begins Responsibility. Dear John; Coltrane; and Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems were nominated for the National Book Award. He is coeditor of Every Eye Shut Aint Asleep, an anthology of poetry by African Americans. Harper was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995.
Francine Prose is the author of nine novels-including Bigfoot Dreams; Primitive People; and, most recently, Hunters and Gatherers. She has also written two story collections: Women and Children First, and The Peaceable Kingdom. Her stories and essays appear widely in publications such as Best American Stories; The New Yorker; The New York Times Magazine; and the Yale Review. She has received Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, and was a Fulbright writer-in-residence in the former Yugoslavia. A film based on her novel, Household Saints, was released in 1993.
Shirley Hazzard - Aug. 16
Shirley Hazzard is the author of several novels, including The Evening of the Holiday; People in Glass Houses; The Bay of Noon; and The Transit of Venus which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. She also wrote Cliffs of Fall, a collection of short stories. A native of Australia and former member of the United Nations Secretariat, Hazzard has published two non-fiction books on international affairs: Defeat of an Ideal, and Countenance of Truth. Her memoir of Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, will be published this year.
Also by:
Jane Shore and Michael Lowenthal - Aug. 13
Howard Norman, Reetika Vazirani, and Leslie Pietrzyk - Aug.14
Carl Phillips and Samantha Gillison - Aug. 17
Helena María Viramontes and Forrest Hamer - Aug. 18
Jennifer Egan, James Longenbach, and Patricia Eakins - Aug. 19
Dan Tobin, Judy Doenges, and Chris Forhan - Aug. 20
Percival Everett; and Matt Bloom - Aug. 21
Evening Readings (starting Aug. 11, at 8:15 p.m.):
Michael Collier, Helen Fremont, and Richard Bausch - Aug. 11
Margot Livesey and G. E. Patterson - Aug. 12
Clark Blaise and Jhumpa Lahiri - Aug. 13
Alan Shapiro and Daniel Wallace - Aug. 14
Thomas Mallon, Edward Hirsch, and Patricia Hampl - Aug. 15
Bharati Mukherjee and Craig Arnold - Aug. 16
Andrea Barrett and Danzy Senna - Aug. 17
Toi Derricotte and Susan Brind Morrow - Aug. 18
C. E. Poverman and Michele Wyrebek - Aug. 20
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Lan Samantha Chang and Mary Leader - Aug. 21
Musicale at Aug. 19, at 8:15 p.m.:
Vermont Symphony Trio, (flute, violin, cello)
For brief biographical sketches of the 1999 conference faculty, please refer to the BLWC website
For those interested in more information about 1999 conference fellows, the following paragraphs provide additional biographical sketches.
Craig Arnold’s first book, Shells, was selected by W. S. Merwin as the 1999 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998; Poetry; The Paris Review; The Yale Review; and are forthcoming in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and an NEA fellowship, he also waited tables at Bread Loaf in 1993.
Matt Bloom has published short fiction in The Crescent Review; Icarus; The Manhattan Spirit; and Words of Wisdom. His first novel is Blue Paradise, and he has nearly completed a second, Sleeping Sharks.
Susan Brind Morrow’s first book, The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, was one of three finalists for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir for 1997. Her most recent work—The Hum of Bees, A Civilization Made of Flowers, Wax and Light—appeared in Harper’s in August of 1998. Morrow lives in upstate New York.
Lan Samantha Chang’s first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, was a finalist for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award; the PEN Center/USA West Literature Award; and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and Creating Fiction. A recipient of fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust; the Michener-Copernicus Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts, Changi taught fiction writing at Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This autumn she will be an Alfred Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University.
Judy Doenges has published her work in The Georgia Review; Nimrod; Equinox; and The Green Mountains Review. She is the recipient of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Arts Trust, and is a book reviewer for The Seattle Times. Her first book is What She Left Me: Stories and a Novella. Doenges lives in Tacoma, Washington.
Patricia Eakins’s novel The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste has received both the NYU Press Prize for Fiction and the Capricorn Fiction Award. Other awards include The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and two NEA fellowships. Eakins’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review; Parnassus; and Conjunctions. The New York Times characterized her story collection, The Hungry Girls, as a “work of imaginative brilliance.”
Chris Forhan’s first book of poems is Forgive Us Our Happiness. He has also published a chapbook, Crumbs of Bread, and his work has appeared in Prairie Schooner; Artful Dodge; Fine Madness; and Willow Springs. He teaches at Trident Technical College in South Carolina.
Helen Fremont is a lawyer with the Massachusetts public defender’s office, and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice. She is a fiction editor for the Marlboro Review, and was an adjunct professor of creative writing at Emerson College and the Harvard Summer School. Fremont’s stories and essays have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; Ploughshares; and The Harvard Review. Her memoir, After Long Silence, is her first book.
Samantha Gillison was born in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in New York City and Papua, New Guinea. She has worked as a secondary school Latin and Greek teacher, and also as a newspaper and news radio reporter. Her novel, The Undiscovered Country, was published in 1998. Gillison’s award-winning short stories have been published in various literary journals. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Forrest Hamer’s first book of poems, Call & Response, won the 1995 Beatrice Hawley Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Callaloo; Kenyon Review; Ploughshares; TriQuarterly; and ZYZZYVA; and also in Best American Poetry 1994. He lives in Oakland, California, is a psychologist, a candidate psychoanalyst, and a lecturer in psychology and in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker; Agni; Epoch; The Louisville Review; and Story Quarterly. She is the recipient of a Transatlantic Review award from the Henfield Foundation, and an O. Henry award. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, was published this year.
Mary Leader practiced law in Oklahoma, first as assistant state’s attorney general and later as referee for the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Her book, Red Signature, won the 1996 National Poetry Series. Having earned an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she now teaches in the Warren Wilson Program. This fall, Leader will begin teaching at the University of Memphis.
James Longenbach is Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His poems have appeared in The Nation; The New Republic; The Paris Review; and The Best American Poetry 1995. His critical works include Modern Poetry After Modernism; Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things; and Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, & Modernism. Threshold is his first poetry collection.
Michael Lowenthal is the author of a novel, The Same Embrace, and has edited several anthologies, most recently Obsessed. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; The Kenyon Review; and Best American Gay Fiction. He is the recipient of a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowship.
G. E. Patterson’s first collection of poetry is Tug, published this year. He is a translator of Brazilian, Caribbean, and African literature. Patterson writes frequently about visual arts, and has received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board; the Jerome Foundation; and the MacDowell Colony.
Leslie Pietrzyk’s first novel, Pears on a Willow Tree, was published in October, 1998, and will appear in paperback in July of this year. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, including TriQuarterly; Iowa Review; Gettysburg Review; New England Review; and Epoch. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Danzy Senna graduated from Stanford Univrsity and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of California. Her first novel, Caucasia, was published in 1998.
Dan Tobin’s first poetry collection is Where The World Is Made. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. He is associate professor of English at Carthage College in Wisconsin, and author of Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney.
Reetika Vazirani was born in India. She received a 1994 Discovery/The Nation Prize. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo; International Quarterly; The Kenyon Review; The Nation; and Prairie Schooner. White Elephants is her first collection of poetry.
Daniel Wallace has published fiction in TriQuarterly; Story; and Glimmer Train. His first novel, Big Fish, was published last year. He lives in Chapel Hill.
Michele Wyrebek won the Intro Series competition in 1995 for her first collection of poems, Be Properly Scared. Her poems have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and lives near Boston.