The Liam Rector Poetry Prize

In honor of the late founding director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, this annual prize is being endowed by Ed Ochester, to whom we give great thanks.

Best of the Best

The work of our faculty is among the best creative work being published today. But don’t take our word for it. Each year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt releases its “Best American Series," showcasing the finest short stories, poems, and essays published in North America from the previous year. Many of our core faculty members have been included in (or guest edited) this prestigious anthology and others. Here’s a sampling.

Top of the List

In its 2007 fiction issue, The Atlantic published a guide to the nation's best graduate programs in creative writing: The Bennington Writing Seminars was distinguished as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs.

Writers at Bennington

Writers who have taught at Bennington include, among others, Bernard Malamud, W.H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Burke, John Gardner, Jamaica Kincaid, Howard Nemerov, Edward Hoagland, and Mary Oliver. For more than 20 years prior to the formation of the Seminars, Bennington hosted the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, where more than 250 writers, such as John Cheever, John Ashbery, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, John Irving, and many others formed part of the long tradition of writers and literature at Bennington.

Philosophy

Generating original work is the focus of the program. In the Writing Seminars, the conventional divide between reading and writing disappears. More than most writing programs, we place a special emphasis upon reading, as we see writing and reading, for the strong writer, to be part of the same process.

Our aim is to educate and provide a vortex for persons of letters—in the words of Ezra Pound, “a radiant node or cluster…from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly flowing.” The residencies, and the program itself, draw to their center an assemblage of writers who vary strikingly in sensibility and style, but share an engagement with words and ideas that propels an energetic and ongoing conversation about literature. In this way, students discover the literary traditions and innovations that inspire, animate, inform, and propel original work. We examine contributions made as essayists, reviewers, commentators, editors, and other roles that together constitute a life in letters.

The Seminars offer an ongoing community of kindred spirits and constructive counsel, honoring the solitary nature of writing and reading and the collaborative voices of education. The student-faculty ratio of five to one assures close attention to each student’s work and progress. The residencies offer an utterly immersive retreat from the rest of the world, a retreat in which workshops and symposia are conducted, batteries are charged, and we then return to an essential solitude.

We have had frequent visitors discussing freedom of speech and freedom of expression, considering the basic freedoms to read and write to be part of the fundamental circulatory system of any livable situation.

However one chooses to use the MFA degree—teaching, further graduate work, or in the many ways a graduate degree concentrates and deepens a life—our emphasis is on the broader and more fundamental concerns of the merits of the work at hand, as well as a participation in the life of letters.