Mary Ruefle & Julia Alvarez

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.

Julia Alvarez has written novels, poetry collections, nonfiction, and books for young readers. Alvarez’s awards include the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. In 2013 she received the prestigious National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. Alvarez is writer-in-residence emeritus at Middlebury College. Her most recent novel, Afterlife, came out in April 2020.

Mary Ruefle is the current Vermont Poet Laureate.  She is the author of many poetry books, including, most recently, Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize; Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Ruefle is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.