This was followed in subsequent years with scholarships to poets, fiction, and nonfiction writers who were just breaking into print in magazines, and then with working scholarships to younger unpublished writers who showed promise. Then-unknowns, who later went on to literary celebrity, included Howard Fast, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, May Swenson, Anne Sexton, Joan Didion, Claude Brown, Ron Hansen, Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Walter Mosely and Pam Houston. The administration of Collier, begun in 1995, has attracted great attention in newspapers around the country and in the literary world, as much for its roster of prize-winning faculty authors as for the dramatic changes enacted in diversity, conference curriculum and social atmosphere. As the oldest and largest writers' conference in the nation, Bread Loaf has found an enduring place in literary history. Its ties to Vermont, however, have remained strong.
Many local residents attend every year.
For thousands of writers, over the past seven and a half decades, that spot has been Bread Loaf.