People in the News

Awards

Bread Loaf faculty member Susan Choi’s latest novel, Flashlight, has been short-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize. Flashlight is a novel that traces family secrets and grief across generations.

Beverly Moss, Director of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN) and professor and director of second-year writing at The Ohio State University, received the Literacies in Action Award from the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts (OCTELA) in March 2026.

Publications

Heidi Boisert MA ‘00 debuted Media Diet with Amar Bakshi in March 2026 at Twenty Summers in Provincetown, MA. Media Diet is an immersive art installation exploring America’s media divide.

In September 2025, Anna Citrino MA ‘94 published her third book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, which offers historical fiction written in verse about early settlers in the Great Plains. 

Winner of the 2025 Book of the Year by Atmosphere Press, Sour Cherries at Buc-ee’s is Mark Elberfeld’s (MA ‘07) debut essay collection; one essay is his Bread Loaf commencement address!

Sebastián Andrés Grandas MA ‘21 was inspired by Bread Loaf professor Michael Katz to translate Sergio Ramírez’s De tropeles y tropelías (1972). Ramírez’s short story collection was written during the Nicaraguan Revolution when Ramírez was part of the Sandinista movement. Grandas was granted permission in early 2025 and his translation is featured in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of the New England Review.

In July 2025, Polly Merritt Ingraham MA ‘84 released her first full-length book, Unconverted: Memoir of a Marriage with Rootstock Publishing. The memoir, delving into Ingraham’s quest for identity and community in today’s society, has won the 2025 International Firebird New Non Fiction Award and the 2025 Literary Titan Gold Award.

Caroline Santinelli MA ‘19 released her first piece of humor writing, Jane Eyre Discovers Ethical Non-Monogamy, in the summer of 2025 via The Belladonna Comedy. Sparked by her reading of Jane Eyre in her Bread Loaf course with professor Brenda Brueggemann in 2019, the piece is a satirical parody of Jane Eyre with a modern twist.

Simple Sage, a play about 19th-century sisters who both married John Deere, was written by Kate Youngdahl Stauss MA ‘15, MLitt ‘23 in one of her Bread Loaf courses and produced for the stage by the White River Valley Players in November 2025. Youngdahl Stauss also created a film through a Bread Loaf Directed Research and Writing project that centers around diaries she found written by former residents of her land; Hill Farmer’s Story aired on Vermont Public in May 2024.