Brad Kessler & Jay Parini

Back Roads Readings was created to bring esteemed poets and writers, both local and regional, to read their work to people in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Readings are followed by a book signing and reception, and are held outside in a tent with socially distanced seating.

Brad Kessler is a critically acclaimed novelist whose early work includes a novel, Lick Creek, (Scribners, 2000), The Woodcutter’s Christmas (Council Oak Books, 2001),and several award-winning children’s books. He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction for his 2006 novel, Birds in Fall (Scribners), a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an NEA Fellowship, as well as a Whiting Writers Award. He is an educator and farmer and the author of a memoir, Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (Scribners, 2009.) His most recent novel is North (Overlook Press), published in 2021.

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, critic and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His numerous books, include New and Collected Poems 1975 – 2015 (Beacon Press, 2016), The Way of Jesus: Living a Spiritual and Ethical Life (Beacon, 2018), The Damascus Road: A Novel of Saint Paul (Doubleday, 2019) and biographies of Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Vidal.  Borges and Me: An Encounter (Doubleday, 2020) is his memoir of a trip in 1970 through the Highlands of Scotland with Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine literary fabulist. His novel about Leo Tolstoy, The Last Station (Henry Holt, 1990), was made into an Academy Award-nominated film with Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer in 2010.