Deadline: 2 April 2011
Michael and Marylee Fairbanks International Fellowship or Tuition Scholarship for African and Caribbean Writers
The Fairbanks award supports a writer living in Africa or the Caribbean to attend the Conference.
The Fairbanks award covers tuition, room, and board at the Conference; in addition, this special award covers travel expenses.
The application deadline for this particular award is April 2 (please note that this deadline is later than the usual Bread Loaf deadline for financial aid, which is March 1).
Admissions Overview
You may apply to the Conference by submitting a sample of original work and an application form. All applicants submit an application and their supporting materials online, except for fellowship candidates who complete an online application as well as mail a copy of their book(s) to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference office.
Acceptance is based on the strength and promise of the writing sample and the admission board's judgment that the applicant will benefit from the Conference. The workshops are designed to accommodate both published writers and those in the early stages of promising careers. For the 2010 Conference, we were able to accept 23 percent of general applicants; 6 percent of those who applied for financial aid received an award.
We cannot enroll anyone for less than the full ten days of the Conference. Applicants must be at least 18 years of age.
There is no application fee.
Application
All applicants submit an application and their supporting materials online, except for fellowship candidates who complete an online application as well as mail a copy of their book(s) to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference office.
To note: Applicants submit their top choices for workshop leader upon acceptance to the Conference, noting it on their deposit/confirmation form. Participants are assigned to a workshop based on our commitment to giving all attendees one of their choices.
We recommend that you print a copy of these directions so you can refer to them as you fill out the online application. The directions contain important details needed to fill in the title, file, and comments fields correctly.
Application directions followed by a link to the online application:
1. Fill in your contact information and create a password to use.
2. Writer name: use this space if you write under a penname.
3. Submission title: write in the title of the work you are submitting with your application. If it's an excerpt from a longer work, please note either the chapter title or title of the manuscript, either is acceptable. If you do not have a single title for your manuscript (for example, if you have a title for each poem or if you're submitting two or more shorter prose pieces), please create a title to use just for this Bread Loaf manuscript; the title field is limited so it may not be possible to enter the title of each poem or story. If you like, you can simply write in "poems for Bread Loaf application." Do not submit more than ten pages of poetry or 6,000 words of prose. (Fellows should note the title of their most recent book.)
4. Genre: choose the genre for your application from the drop-down list. If you are applying for financial aid, you can apply in only one financial aid category. (Descriptions of the financial aid categories can be found in the Admissions section. The FAQ page can help you decide which financial aid category is best for you.) If you are applying for financial aid and would like to be considered for a spot as a general contributor in the event that you do not receive an award, you will need to make a separate application in each category. Nevertheless, you will be able to use the same e-mail and password for both applications.
5. File: General contributors, work-study scholars, Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation scholars, and Middlebury Student scholars—upload your manuscript to your account. We are able to accept the following file formats: Word (.doc or .docx) and Adobe Acrobat (.pdf). Fiction and nonfiction manuscripts cannot exceed 6,000 words and poetry manuscripts are limited to ten pages of poems. Your writing sample must be uploaded in one document. Please note: If your prose manuscript is excerpted from a longer project, please include a one-page synopsis at the start of your document (the synopsis can be single-spaced and does not count toward the 6,000-word limit).
Fellows—create and upload a cover page noting your name as well as the title, publisher, and publication date of the book under consideration with you application. Mail the book(s) to the Bread Loaf office as described on the Admissions page of this web site.
Tuition scholars—upload a PDF document that contains the following supporting materials: (1) a detailed list of publications (noting the title, publication, and publication date for each piece); (2) a sample of work published within the last three years (please send scans of the work as it appeared in the publication)—prose writers should send one published piece, and poets up to ten published pages; and (3) because tuition scholars are contributors in workshops, please also include a manuscript of unpublished work in the genre in which you are applying. (See the link to the manuscript guidelines on the left of this page.) You will be able to upload only one document to your online application. Before starting the process, please be sure all of the supporting materials are contained in one PDF document that follows the numerical order noted above. The correct order is very important.
Auditors—the online program requires that an applicant upload a document to the file field, so please upload a document that includes your answer to question number 5 described in the comments section below. In this case you need answer only questions 1 to 4 in the comments section.
6. Comments: use this field to address the following five items. Please number your answers 1 to 5.
1--Have you attended Bread Loaf before? If yes, please note the dates.
2--Have you attended other writing workshops? If yes, please note them here.
3--Do you have any publications in the genre in which you are applying? If yes, please list them here.
4--Information needed to make room assignments: please let us know if you plan to have a car on campus and note your age at the time of the Conference.
5--In 300-500 words, answer the question "What do you hope to gain from attending the Conference?" (Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe applicants should use this section to illustrate how they meet the Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe criteria. See the Admissions section for a description of the BL/RJ Scholarship.)
7. Click on Submit. (This button allows you to view the information you entered and make any changes needed.)
8. The program will send an automatic confirmation of receipt to your e-mail address. (If you do not receive this confirmation please be sure to contact the Bread Loaf office.)
Click here for the online application.
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753
Phone: 802-443-5286
E-mail: blwc@middlebury.edu