October 3: Reading with poet/translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain at 51 Main in Middlebury.

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Mid-week Break

Belle Boggs Reads at 2016 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

belle boggsAuthor Belle Boggs read her short story “Deer Season” at the 2016 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010), a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, and The Art of Waiting: on Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood (Graywolf Press, 2016). Mattaponi Queen was awarded the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Boggs’s stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s, Orion, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Slate, Ecotone, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Mid-week Break

Craig Childs Reads at Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

Craig ChildsAuthor Craig Childs read a piece of narrative non-fiction at the 2015 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Craig Childs writes about the relationships among humans, animals, landscape, and time. His stories come from visceral, personal experience, whether in the company of illicit artifact dealers or in deep wilderness. Childs’ dozen-plus critically acclaimed books include his most recent, Apocalyptic Planet, winner of the Orion Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.

Childs’ work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, and Outside. A commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Childs lives in Western Colorado and teaches writing for both University of Alaska in Anchorage and Southern New Hampshire University.

Mid-week Break

Ginger Strand Reads at Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

Ginger StrandAuthor Ginger Strand read the first chapter of her latest book, The Brothers Vonnegut (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), at the 2015 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Ginger Strand is the author of a novel and three books of narrative nonfiction, and has published essays and fiction in Harper’s, the New York Times, OnEarth, Tin House, The Believer, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor, and more. A former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton, Ginger has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as residency grants from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in New York City and the Catskill Mountains.

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Strand began, “The Brothers Vonnegut opens in 1945—it’s the story of two brothers and as the book opens the older brother, Bernard, is the success story in the family—he’s a famous research chemist—and he’s working on helping to de-ice the American bomber planes that are flying on their bombing missions in Germany and this is very top secret work and it’s going to lead him into a huge joint corporate and military attempt to control the weather that took place in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s in America. This is all true. I’m going to read from the very opening of the book, which finds the other brother—the younger brother—Kurt, at this moment in time.”

 

 

Mid-week Break

Esther Allen Reads at the 2016 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference

esther allenEsther Allen read an excerpt from her translation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel Zama (NYRB Classics, August 2016) at the 2016 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Her translation of Jorge Luis Borges’ Three Essays: The Last Voyage of Ulysses / Flaubert and His Exemplary Destiny / Immortality, appeared in NER 20.3.

Allen is a two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships (1995 and 2010). She has translated the works of Jorge Luis Borges, José Martí, Alma Guillermoprieto, Felisberto Hernández, Rosario Castellanos, and others from Spanish, and that of Gustave Flaubert, Linda Lê, Blaise Cendrars, and others from French. Last year, she was a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on a forthcoming biography of José Martí. She co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival in 2005, and has worked with the PEN/Heim Translation Fund since it was founded in 2003.

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Allen began by sharing some context for her reading:

“. . . [T]his is a historical novel in three parts, and the parts are very clearly dated: 1790, 1794, 1799, which to an English speaking audience in the United States are not necessarily dates that would resonate tremendously within the history of Latin America. (The novel is set in Paraguay.) But for a Latin American reader, this is the decade prior to the decade that launches Latin America’s independence from Spain. And the novel’s main character—whose voice is the novel—it is a novel of voice—is a bureaucrat, a functionary, at the end of the Spanish empire. But he doesn’t know it’s the end of the Spanish empire. The reader knows that it’s the end of the Spanish empire, and that this world which to him seems to be so static and so unchanging is about to change completely. But he doesn’t know that, and never knows that. So that is part of what accounts for this silence in the novel.”

“. . . I’ll add that [Zama] has one of the most stunning epigraphs of any novel I know. The dedication is ‘to the victims of expectation.’

Mid-week break

Pam Houston Reads at Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

PamHoustonAuthor Pam Houston read her short story, “Maggie on the Road,” at the 2015 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012.  She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat; a novel, Sight Hound; and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century.  She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award, and multiple teaching awards. She directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, teaches in the Institute of American Arts Low Residency MFA Program, is professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and teaches at numerous writers’ conferences both here and abroad.

Mid-Week Break

Geoffrey Brock Reads at Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference

Geoffrey BrockOn June 4, 2016, poet and translator Geoffrey Brock captivated the audience at the second annual Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference as he read from his translations of Patrizia Cavalli’s poetry and from his book Voices Bright Flags (Waywiser Press, 2016), winner of the Ninth Anthony Hecht Prize. Brock’s poetry and translations have appeared in NER 19.3, 21.3, and 25.1-2.

In addition to Voices Bright Flags, Brock is the author of the poetry collection Weighing Light, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of books by Cesare Pavese, Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, Italo Calvino, and others. He is the recipient of translation awards from the Modern Languages Association, the PEN Center USA, the American Translators Association, and Poetry magazine, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

Patritzi Cavalli (English and Italian)

 

Wilson’s Carolina Parakeet

Mid-Week Break

Angela Torres Reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

UnknownAngela Narciso Torres gave an insightful poetry reading from Blood Orange (Willow Books, 2013) at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where she was the 2015 Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry. Blood Orange won the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry.

Torres, a reader for NER, has poetry in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals, as well as in Spoon River Poetry Review and Kyoto Journal. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, and Midwest Writing Center. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for RHINO.

 

Mid-Week Break

Ricardo Nuila Reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Unknown-1Ricardo Nuila gave a stirring reading of his work at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the 2015 recipient of the first annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and he attended the conference as the first New England Review Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar. His short fiction appeared in NER‘s Vol. 35.1.

Dr. Ricardo Nuila is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is a hospitalist and teaches internal medicine and medical humanities. His fiction, essays, and reporting have appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Atlantic, New England Review, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other publications.

 

Mid-Week Break

Alan Shapiro reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

alan-shapiroAlan Shapiro reads his poems at the 2014 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

“Dressing Table”

“Heavy Snow”

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Alan Shapiro was educated at Brandeis University. The author of numerous collections of poetry, Shapiro has explored family, loss, domesticity, and the daily aspects of people’s lives in free verse and traditional poetic forms. He has published over ten books of poetry, most recently Reel to Reel (2014), Night of the Republic (2012), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Prize, and Old War (2008), winner of the Ambassador Book Award.

Mid-Week Break

Paul Otremba Reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Paul Otremba gave an enthralling reading of poems from his second book, Pax Americana, at the Summer 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

 

 

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Paul Otremba was the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as the Amanda Davis Returning Fellow. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Currency (Four Way Books, 2009), and Pax Americana (Four Way Books, 2015). His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in New England Review (25.3), Kenyon Review, Witness, Literary Imagination, Southwest Review, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, Poetry Daily, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. He is assistant professor of creative writing at Rice University and serves on the editorial panel of NER.

 

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