Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference to Offer Free Readings and Lectures Daily
RIPTON, VT — The Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the oldest writers’ conference in the country, will hold its 100th session when it begins Wednesday, August 13, and ends Saturday, August 23. Held every summer since 1926 on Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, the conference remains one of America’s most respected literary institutions. Ten days of workshops, lectures, classes, and readings provide writers with rigorous practical and theoretical approaches to their craft. The mountain campus has attracted many renowned authors and poets such as Robert Frost, Carson McCullers, John Irving, Terry Tempest Williams, Toni Morrison, and Julia Alvarez. The Centennial starting this summer will be celebrated all year long culminating in special events planned for summer 2026.
Conference lectures and readings take place daily and are free and open to the public.
Writer Camille T. Dungy is among the literary figures who will serve on the conference faculty. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry; 100 Best African American Poems; Best American Essays; The 1619 Project; All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis; over 40 other anthologies; plus dozens of venues including the New Yorker; Poetry; Literary Hub; Paris Review; and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry. Dungy will offer a lecture titled “An Incomplete Catalog of the Role of Time and Place” on Tuesday, August 19, at 9 a.m. and a reading with Claire Messud on Thursday, August 21, at 8 p.m.
Other faculty include Victor LaValle and Paisley Rekdal. LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, the novels The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle’s Destroyer and Eve. His novel The Changeling aired on Apple TV+. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York and now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University. LaValle will offer a reading with Valzhyna Mort on Friday, August 15 at 8 p.m.
Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is the editor and creator of the digital archive projects West, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah Poet Laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center. Rekdal will offer a lecture titled “Riddles in the Meadhall: What Old English Riddles Can Teach Us About Wonder and Metaphor” on Friday, August 15 at 9 a.m. and a reading with Mat Johnson on Friday, August 22 at 8 p.m.
“What makes Bread Loaf exciting is its ability to serve as a source of encouragement to writers in their more formative years,” said Jennifer Grotz, director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August and also the Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Translators’ Conference that take place concurrently in June. “The talent of the experienced writers on our faculty, the stunning setting, and the conference’s history combine to inspire budding poets and authors as they find their voices and work on their craft of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.”
This year, more than 260 writers, students, faculty, literary agents, and editors will gather to participate in the 100th session of the conference. The general public is invited to attend a daily schedule of free readings and lectures that take place in the Little Theater, located on the Bread Loaf campus on Route 125.
The 2025 series of public events will begin on Wednesday, August 13, at 8 p.m., with a welcome by Jennifer Grotz, who is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling, as well as Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. Also a translator, she’s published two books of translations from the French: Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings, by Tunisian-born novelist Hubert Haddad. Her co-translations with Piotr Sommer from the Polish of Jerzy Ficowski’s Everything I Don’t Know received the PEN America Best Translated Book of Poetry Award in 2022.
After Grotz’s opening remarks, special guest Lauren Groff will read from her work. Groff will also take part on the Bread Loaf Centennial Panel, along with Tomás Q. Morín, Carl Phillips, Laura van den Berg, and Paul Yoon on Thursday, August 14 at 9 a.m. Groff is the author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist three times for the National Book Award. She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Guggenheim Foundation, was given the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential list in 2024. Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx. Brawler, her third story collection, will be published in February 2026. Later in the conference, Grotz will offer a lecture titled “Afterlives” on Sunday, August 17, at 9 a.m. and a reading with Danielle Evans on Wednesday, August 20 at 4:15 p.m.
For a complete schedule of lectures and readings, see the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Web page. Events are subject to change. Call to confirm dates and times at 802-443-5286 through August 12; 802-443-2700 after August 13.
The Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences include the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, designed for those who want to bring more depth of knowledge to their writing about the environment, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, which highlights the important role that literary translators of poetry and prose play in the United States and beyond.