News

We came very close to an even darker reality on January 6, 2021, writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose for the Guardian. “There’s a very particular, very specific chill we feel when our worst suspicions have been confirmed, when our darkest fears and imaginings turn out to be mere shadows of reality,” Prose writes. Alongside Lloyd Green, Simon Balto, and Geoffrey Kabaservice, Prose offers a sobering reflection on the new evidence brought forth by the January 6 hearings and just how close the United States came to the brink. “The evidence presented in this initial hearing was so clear, so convincing, I cannot imagine anyone not being persuaded unless they have totally lost touch with reason and reality,” she writes, “in which case I truly cannot imagine the future of this country: what will happen to us next.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/10/how-was-the-first-january-6-hearing-our-panel-weighs-in

The new Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College welcomes its inaugural cohort of seven writers, Danielle Elizabeth Chin, Neşe Devenot ’09, Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander, Mona Kareem, Madhu Kaza, Obi Nwizu, and Dianca London Potts, this summer. The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 4 through June 26, 2022. During their residency, fellows reside on Bard’s campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works.

“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.

During their residency, Hurston Fellows may participate in a daily program of workshops and meetings, offered in collaboration with the Bard College Institute of Writing and Thinking. However, fellows may also choose to spend their time working, writing, and researching independently. The residency includes visits by literary agents and editors, as well as readings and lectures by established writers and scholars. This summer, the two guest lecturers include Carolyn Ferrell, author of Miss Metropolitan, which was recently shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and literary agent Charlotte Sheedy of Sheedy Lit in conversation with her client Jive Poetic about the agent-author relationship and how an idea becomes a book. Fellows will also be invited back to Bard College in October of the fellowship year for a weekend-long meeting and workshop. 

Danielle Elizabeth Chin graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marymount Manhattan College in May 2013 with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in English and World Literatures and a minor in Creative Writing before receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from The New School in Creative Writing with a concentration in creative nonfiction. She has been an Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College since 2015, where she has taught Introduction to Creative Writing I, Introduction to Creative Writing II, Intermediate Creative Writing, an Independent Study in Nonfiction, and a Special Topics course. She has also served as a Writing Assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and for the CUNY EDGE program. Her other professional experiences include working as a research assistant for poet David Lehman, a teaching assistant for novelist Sigrid Nunez, and an assistant at a literary agency.  Her work has appeared in The Inquisitive Eater, The Best American Poetry Blog, and Side B Magazine. 

Neşe Devenot ’09 received her PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy, the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”), and radical poetics. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College in philosophy and literature. Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), University of Cincinnati, and is a Lecturer and Medical Humanities Program Assistant at Pennsylvania State University. She has held positions as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Medicine, Society, and Culture, in the Bioethics Department at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University (2018-20) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the Humanities Program and English Department at University of Puget Sound (2015-18). Her research explores the function of metaphor and other literary devices in verbal accounts of psychedelic experiences. She was awarded “Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies” from Breaking Convention in 2016 and received the Article Prize for best publication in Romanticism Studies from European Romantic Review in 2020. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. She was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which she moderated during 2011-13, and has presented on psychedelics at conferences in the United States, Mexico, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander received her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from Saint Joseph’s University in 2005, M.S.W. from University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work in 1995, and B.A. in sociology and history/gender studies from Saint Lawrence University in 1993. Before teaching, she worked as a social worker and counselor. She is a Visiting and Senior Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the Haub School of Business, School of Health and Education, and College of Arts and Sciences. She also serves as a diversity consultant at Saint Joseph’s University. Her research interests include anti-racist and social justice pedagogies, womanist and feminist epistemologies, teacher preparation educational programs, and intersectionality within leadership development. She presents on topics including leadership and student advocacy; mentoring and feminist perspectives; global engagement, training, and development; and social work and mental health. She has won several awards and special recognitions including the Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching for the Gender Studies Program Department at Saint Joseph’s University (2014).

Mona Kareem holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University of Kuwait. She is a research fellow at Center for Humanities at Tufts University (2021-2022) and a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. She has taught at Princeton, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. She was an affiliated research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. She has won several awards and honors including a nomination for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 for her English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within, which was reprinted by English PEN in 2017.

Madhu H. Kaza received her MFA in fiction, M.Phil and MA in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in English from the University of Michigan. She serves as Associate Director of Microcollege Program and Faculty Development at the Bard Prison Initiative and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation and her own writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Guernica, The Yale Review, Two Lines, Gulf Coast, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a non-fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Yaddo residency. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and has taught at New York University, The New School, and at Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, among other institutions. 

Obi Nwizu received her MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom and her BA in Print Journalism from Georgia State University. Born in Anambra State, Nigeria, raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but currently calling Harlem home, Nwizu is a lover of month-long international vacations, vegan food, afrobeat, and rom-coms. When not writing, she teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and composition writing for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Selected publications include “Gathered Pieces of the Sun” in The Almbec, “Grapeseed Fields” in Torch Literary Arts, and “Lust Painted Walls” in Imagine Curve.

Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School, MA in English and MA in Humanities from Arcadia University, and BA in English from Temple University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at Pratt Institute and teaches writing courses at Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College at The New School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Lenny Letter, The Village Voice, Vice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink / Simon and Schuster.

About the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College is a 3-week residential program designed to enable writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, specifically, those who are without access to sabbaticals or their institution’s research funding. We seek fellows who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book length work. Prospective Fellows should submit a vita, a letter of recommendation by someone familiar with their work, and an abstract of the project they wish to work on during the three-week residency. The abstract should not exceed 2000 words. Applicants need a college or university affiliation and should have a minimum of five years of teaching as an adjunct, lecturer or visiting professor. The application deadline is April 15, 2023. All applicants will be notified of the admission Committee’s decision by May 15, 2023. To submit materials or for questions please email [email protected].
 

Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself Features New Work from Stephen Graham Jones, Bronka Nowicka, Coral Bracho, Shane McCrae, Rick Moody, Kathryn Davis, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and Many Others

Humans have a genius for fear. Terrors of every imaginable kind surround us, as often as not the wily demons of our own creation, and grow more ghastly, untenable, and malignant with every passing generation. “Whether founded in truth or imagination, fear has a toxic genius for pervading our lives,” writes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow. “It has many faces and many means of forcing itself upon us.” 

Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College, which is now celebrating more than 40 years of continuous publication—collects fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from 30 contemporary writers who are willing to interrogate the wide spectrum of apprehensions, terrors, and dread we humans experience. “War, inequality, abandonment, an evolving climate catastrophe born of the relentless degradation of our planet, this tenacious pandemic, the unknown—such are only a few realities that daily generate existential fear . . . ” Morrow continues in his Editor’s Note. “Yet fear is ubiquitous in our myths and fairy tales, songs and theater, art and literature, and the historical legacies of every culture. Fear and its many nemeses—confidence, bravery, faith among them—are locked in a mortal dance in every narrative humans create, both in life and on the page.”

Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, Fear Itself features new fiction from Ray Bradbury Prize winner Stephen Graham Jones, novelist and PEN/Martha Albrand Prize winner Rick Moody, Shirley Jackson Award winner Jeffrey Ford, and Jerusalem Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. The first English translations of “Two Stories” by Polish writer Bronka Nowicka and “Like A Disease Whose Threshold No One Can Cross, She Says,” by Mexican poet Coral Bracho also appear in the issue along with new poems by Whiting Award winner Shane McCrae, Elizabeth Robinson, and Jessica Reed, among others.

Additional contributors to Fear Itself include Julia Elliott, Bennett Sims, Akil Kumarasamy, Katheryn Davis, Kristine Ong Muslim, Brandon Hobson, Monica Datta, Michael Harris Cohen, Brian Evenson, Barbara Tomash, Matthew Baker, Tori Malcangio, Bin Ramke, Rebecca Lilly, Genevieve Valentine, Terese Svoboda, Rob Walsh, Mary Kuryla, Troy Jollimore, Quintan Ana Wikswo, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019, and The Best American Short Stories 2021.

“The process of creating art, much like the Black experience in America, relies on an innate ability to see beyond the limits of circumstance and a belief that something beautiful will come through faith and commitment,” writes Bard alumna Evan Nicole Brown ’16. In a report for the Hollywood Reporter on the history of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and its current exhibition at SoFi Stadium—a first for the Inglewood facility—Brown documents the importance of this public exhibition of the more than 50-year-old collection of Black art. The exhibition, currently on display through June 2022, features “more than 70 works of art by prominent Black artists,” and serves to “chronicle, in a chronological way, the evolution of African-American life in the United States through the lens of artistic contribution,” says Khalil Kinsey, chief curator of the collection and son of the founders of the Kinsey Collection.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/the-kinsey-african-american-art-history-collection-sofi-stadium-1235152852/

Bard College alumnus Gabriel Braunstein ’20 is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I hope to serve a new community as best I can,” said Braunstein. “I am excited to work in a classroom and meet my new neighbors.”

Braunstein graduated from Bard in 2020 with a degree in literature. He will serve as an education volunteer in the Eastern Caribbean, working in cooperation with local community and partner organizations on sustainable development projects.

The volunteer cohorts are made up of both first-time volunteers and volunteers who were evacuated in early 2020. Upon finishing a three-month training, volunteers will collaborate with their host communities on locally prioritized projects in one of Peace Corps’ six sectors—agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health or youth in development—and all will engage in COVID-19 response and recovery work.

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Shuangting Xiong as Assistant Professor of Chinese. Xiong’s tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022-2023 academic year. Her research focus is twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. “I’m very excited to join the community at Bard in the fall, and to explore and settle in the beautiful Hudson Valley area with my dog, a two-year old golden retriever named Mira,” said Xiong.
 
Shuangting Xiong received her PhD in Chinese from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She specializes in twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. She is particularly interested in the relation between emotion and politics and the mediating role aesthetics plays in it. Her current book-length project examines the evolution of melodramatic narratives of family, kinship, and the Chinese revolution across different media in twentieth-century China. Her work aims to create cross-cultural dialogues, highlighting the vital influences that global circulations of materials and ideas have on aesthetic debates in the Chinese context.

As museums and exhibition spaces make efforts to showcase more diverse artwork and perspectives, in her review of Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers, Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, considers the cost for the artist. Noting Khan’s usage of collage and texture, Ramadan calls the exhibition “energetic and ambitious,” with many pieces serving as “a deliberate reflection on capitalist economies of extraction and imperialist trade routes that continually ravage the Middle East and South Asia.” Larger questions arise when it comes to representation and its relation to the labor of artists of color, however. In attempting to to reeducate its audience to “the fundamentals of Islam,” the exhibition “encourag[es] an anthropological approach to the work,” Ramadan writes. “Ultimately, I Am an Archive raises urgent questions about the kind of ‘educational’ labor art institutions expect artists of color to perform in return for their inclusion.”
 
Read More in Art Papers

Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.

Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”

Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.

Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.

Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded three Bard faculty members 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu and Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock Peter Filkins have been named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. Incoming Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities Thomas Chatterton Williams, who will begin teaching at the College in spring 2023, has also been selected.  Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Mengestu, Filkins, and Williams were among a diverse group of 180 exceptional artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2022 Fellowship. Mengestu was awarded a Fellowship for his work in fiction, Filkins for his work in biography, and Williams for his work in general nonfiction.

“We are proud of and grateful for Bard’s 2022 Fellows, who represent an astonishing range of achievement,” said Bard Dean of the College Deirdre d’Albertis. “Living and learning alongside colleagues who have been recognized this year–and in the past–by the Guggenheim Foundation inspires us all to celebrate the vital work of artists, writers, and scholars in our community.”

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2022 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names(Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. In its cover page review of All Our Names, the New York Times Book Review said “You can’t turn the pages fast enough, and when you’re done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . While questions of race, ethnicity, and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully—but never didactically—kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.” BA, Georgetown University; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2016.

Peter Filkins teaches courses in translation at Bard College, and also creative writing and literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he is Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature. Filkins has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to the International Research Center for Culture Studies in Vienna for Spring 2023. He has published five books of poetry, Water / Music (2021), The View We’re Granted (2012), Augustine’s Vision (2010), After Homer(2002), and What She Knew (1998). He is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken(2006), as well as her novels, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann (1999). In addition, he has translated H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey (2008), Panorama (2011), and The Wall (2014), and has published a biography, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (2019). Co-winner of the 2013 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, he has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, from the American Academy in Berlin, and from the Fulbright Commission of Austria. He has been awarded the Stover Prize in Poetry from Southwest Review, the New American Press Chapbook Award, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv – Marbach. Previously he was the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association and received a Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian government, as well as serving as Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. BA, Williams College; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2007.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a columnist at Harper’s, a 2019 New America Fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. He  joins Bard as a Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities beginning in Spring 2023.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic, community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Big Read Hudson Valley, which will take place April 6–30, 2022, is a collaboration between Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine.

The Big Read Hudson Valley will kick off with a reading from Sandra Cisneros, author of the 2022 Big Read book selection, The House on Mango Street, on April 6 at the Fisher Center. Cisneros will read from her acclaimed novel followed by a conversation in English and Spanish with Mariel Fiori and Dinaw Mengestu.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros has been recognized by critics, professors, and readers alike as one of most important contributions to modern literature. This landmark story collection relates the triumphant coming-of-age of young Esperanza Cordero who finds her own voice and inner potential to overcome the impediments of poverty, gender, and her Chicana-American heritage.

Live-streaming of this event made possible by Radio Kingston.

Signed copies of The House on Mango Street will be available for sale in the lobby from Oblong Books and Music.

Sandra Cisneros’s appearance made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Kingston.
https://www.bard.edu/big-read/

After coauthoring Flavors of Oakland at 17, it might have seemed inevitable that Bard alum Elazar Sontag would end up as the restaurant editor for a major publication. But according to Sontag, who worked for years in the food industry, that hasn’t always been the plan. “I didn’t work in restaurants because I thought it would make me a better food writer,” Sontag said in an interview with the Oaklandside. “I worked in restaurants because I truly believed that I was going to become a restaurant cook and eventually a chef.” Several experiences led Sontag to a different path, however, who noted that “kitchens are complicated places to be queer.” Now, in his new role as restaurant editor for Bon Appétit, Sontag will continue writing about queer food culture. “So much of what I love to cover as a writer and editor is about these queer restaurant spaces,” he says. “It feels like such a gift that I get to tell the stories and celebrate these spaces that when I was a teen, I didn’t even know that existed.”
 
Read More on the Oaklandside

As news of the war in Ukraine proliferated Western news cycles, what information reached Russians and how? Masha Gessen, distinguished writer in residence, spoke with Ezra Klein on the Ezra Klein Show about the information vacuum experienced by Russians, Vladimir Putin’s historical conception of himself, and how the sanctions deployed by the United States and others may not, ultimately, sway Putin’s current course of action. “The way that the narrative of sanctions works is it matches the working definition of insanity,” Gessen says. “Sanctions are the thing that never works, that the United States and other Western countries try over and over again expecting a different outcome.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Gessen outlined what they see as the likeliest paths forward for the war and its global implications.
 
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Even if victory seems elusive, assisting resistance remains crucial, writes Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, for Bloomberg. Citing a history of citizen resistance to occupying forces and “shadow armies,” the West’s decision to bolster the Ukrainian army is undoubtedly the right move, he argues, no matter the outcome of the war. “However puny in military terms, armed resistance undercuts that projection of omnipotence,” Buruma says. “It reveals the vulnerability of the aggressor, just by showing that people can fight back. That sense of vulnerability can grow over time.”
 
Read More in Bloomberg

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic, community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Big Read Hudson Valley, which will take place April 6–30, 2022, is a collaboration between Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine.

The Big Read Hudson Valley will kick off with a reading from Sandra Cisneros, author of the 2022 Big Read book selection, The House on Mango Street, on April 6 at the Fisher Center. Cisneros will read from her acclaimed novel followed by a conversation in English and Spanish with Mariel Fiori and Dinaw Mengestu.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros has been recognized by critics, professors, and readers alike as one of most important contributions to modern literature. This landmark story collection relates the triumphant coming-of-age of young Esperanza Cordero who finds her own voice and inner potential to overcome the impediments of poverty, gender, and her Chicana-American heritage.

Live-streaming of this event made possible by Radio Kingston.

Signed copies of The House on Mango Street will be available for sale in the lobby from Oblong Books and Music.

Sandra Cisneros’s appearance made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Kingston.
https://www.bard.edu/big-read/

Katy Schneider ’14, features editor for New York magazine, won the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) Next Award for journalists under 30. ASME Next Award winners are judged by their portfolio of work and are chosen each year for “their potential to make significant contributions to magazine journalism.” Schneider and the rest of this year’s winners will be honored at ASME’s annual award presentation on April 5, 2022.
 
Read More in New York
 
Read More on the Verge, as Reported by Aude White ’12

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Hua Hsu as Professor of Literature. Hsu will begin this tenured appointment in 2022-2023 academic year.
 
“Welcoming a public thinker of Hua Hsu’s stature to Bard is an event truly to be celebrated by the entire community. He brings tremendous intellectual range and energy to Languages and Literature, building on Bard’s traditional commitment to practicing artists who are at the forefront of their fields,” said Deirdre d’Albertis, Bard’s Dean of the College. “As a scholar and writer, Hua Hsu promises to strengthen and expand our offerings in American Studies, Asian Studies, Written Arts, and Literature. I am grateful in particular to Professors Nathan Shockey and Peter L’Official for their inspired efforts in recruiting Professor Hsu.” 
 
“I'm thankful to President Botstein and Dean d’Albertis for their enthusiasm and faith in me,” said Hsu. “I’m delighted to join Bard at a moment of such great ambition and possibility, and I look forward to learning the ins and outs of this singular institution.”
 
Hua Hsu is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming memoir Stay True (Doubleday, 2022). Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker, having previously contributed to Artforum, Slate, the Village Voice, and The Wire (UK). He served on the editorial board of A New Literary History of America (HUP, 2009) and his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He currently serves on the boards of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics of color. Hsu previously taught at Vassar College. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. 

Novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, will host an online evening of readings to celebrate the publication of the latest issue of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College. Morrow will be joined by Conjunctions:77 contributors Charles Bernstein, Anelise Chen, Shelley Jackson, Tracie Morris, and Arthur Sze. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Elliott Bay Book Company, takes place on Friday, January 21, at 8 p.m. ET. To register, please visit the Eventbrite page.

About the Issue
Published by Bard College in fall 2021, Conjunctions: 77: States of Play, The Games Issue gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers who are willing, through their writing, to invoke one of the oldest, most audacious questions one mortal can put to another: “Do you want to play a game?” Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, States of Play features a collection of poems by celebrated Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote, a short story by international bestseller David Shields, poems by PEN/Malamud Award winner Nam Le, a new short story by Jerusalem Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates, new poems from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze, a new series of genre-bending work from cross-genre experimental writer Shelley Jackson, a new poem from National Book Award and Bollingen Prize winner Nathaniel Mackey, and a collaborative duet between Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, two of the most revered voices in American poetry. The issue also includes work from Joanna Scott, John Darcy, Heather Altfeld, Kyoko Mori, James Morrow, Catherine Imbriglio, Pierre Reverdy, Robin Hemley, Anelise Chen, S. P. Tenhoff, Lowry Pressly, Cole Swensen, Rae Armantrout, Lucas Southworth, Kelsey Peterson, John Dimitroff, Alyssa Pelish, Tim Raymond, Justin Noga, Brian Evenson, and Kate Colby.

About the Participants
Charles Bernstein is the author of Topsy-Turvy and Pitch of Poetry (both University of Chicago Press). In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry. With Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein coedited Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press).

Anelise Chen’s first book, So Many Olympic Exertions, came out with Kaya Press in 2017. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Shelley Jackson is the author of Riddance (Black Balloon), Half Life (HarperCollins), The Melancholy of Anatomy(Anchor), hypertexts including Patchwork Girl (Eastgate Systems), and several children’s books, including The Old Woman and the Wave (DK) and Mimi’s Dada Catifesto (Clarion Books). She is known for her cross-genre experiments, most notably SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2,095 volunteers.

Tracie Morris’s recent books include the forthcoming titles handholding: on the other hand (Kore Press), human/nature poems (Litmus Press), Who Do With Words (expanded edition, Chax Press) and Hard Korè: Poems of Mythos and Place(Joca Seria Press).

Arthur Sze recieved the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His newest book is The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon).

Bradford Morrow is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.

Two Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Art history and Italian studies major Francesca Houran ’23 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at the University of Trento in Italy, where she will be the first to participate in a newly established tuition exchange program with Bard. “Through studying abroad, I hope to further my knowledge of the hermaphrodite within the context of the Italian Renaissance and how it influences the gender binary in contemporary Italy. I am also excited to explore the ascending, vertically-oriented architecture of museums, churches, and monuments that prompts climbing and physical ascension as a symbol of conquest and hierarchy,” says Houran. “My overarching goal is to build a foundation for a career in ethical museum curation and nuanced communication of histories surrounding gender, race, and colonialism—a goal that traveling through the Gilman Scholarship will make possible for me as a low-income college student.”

Biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 has been awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. “I am grateful for the Gilman scholarship and excited for the opportunity to travel abroad and learn more about international healthcare systems and the ways that Covid has impacted nations differently. My additional focus is to continue working on promoting inclusion in STEM on a global scale,” says Tilley.

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.

Bard Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason reviews celebrated short fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis’s most recent book for the New York Times. “Essays Two, Lydia Davis’s new collection of 19 pieces on translation and the learning of languages, all written over the past two decades, offers overwhelming proof of the benefits to a writer of a practice of translation,” writes Mason. And yet readers “with no interest in translation, little taste for essays and zero desire to become writers will nonetheless find themselves burning through its 571 pages,” he asserts. “[W]ith recognition that the mind we’re meeting on the page is awake to the world in ways that feel necessary and new.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/essays-two-lydia-davis.html

Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Robert Kelly curates The Brooklyn Rail’s 64th Radical Poetry Reading featuring four major American poets, three of whom are Bardians. Billie Chernicoff ’78, Pierre Joris ’69, Kimberly Lyons ’81, and Jerome Rothenberg will read at this online event taking place over Zoom on Wednesday, December 8 at 1pm ET. Register for the event here.

American poet Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn. He attended CUNY and Columbia University and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. He has authored more than 60 published volumes of fiction, poetry, and prose-poems. His 1967 debut novel The Scorpions first brought him a cult readership, and in 1980 his book Kill The Messenger won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. 

Writer Billie Chernicoff is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Amoretti (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2020), as well as The Red Dress (Dr. Cicero Books, 2015), Bronze, and Waters Of (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2018 and 2016). 

Poet, translator, essayist, anthologist Pierre Joris has moved between Europe. the United States, and North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations, and anthologies. Most recently, Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (Black Fountain Press 2020), the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FGS 2020), and A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly and Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan, A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (all Contra Mundum Press 2020). 

Poet Kimberly Lyons is the author of Capella (Oread Press, 2018), Approximately Near (Metambesendotorg, 2016), Soonest Mended (Belladonna Collaborative), Calcinatio (Faux Press) and a limited edition collaboration with artist Ed Epping, Mettle (Granary Books). 

Internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer Jerome Rothenberghas published over 90 books of poetry and 12 assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. 
 
https://brooklynrail.org/events/2021/12/08/radical-poetry-reading-with-robert-kelly-1/

As a teenager, he helped provide safe passage to artists and intellectuals out of Vichy France. He went on to teach literature at Bard College for six decades, writes Alex Vadukul for the New York Times. “Clad in his familiar tweed jacket, he taught French, German and Russian classics and was known for popular courses like 10 Plays That Shook The World. But on Bard’s leafy campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., Mr. Rosenberg also represented a remarkable living link to Holocaust history.”

Justus Rosenberg’s remarkable life has been remembered in several publications and news outlets around the world including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jerusalem Post, National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Deutsche Welle, and Kirkus Reviews among others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/nyregion/justus-rosenberg-dead.html

Associate Professor of Literature Alys Moody and coeditor Stephen J. Ross have been awarded the 2020 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection for their book Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury).

Awarding the prize, the Modernist Studies Association writes:

Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross’s Global Modernists on Modernism is a groundbreaking anthology that will have an immeasurable impact. It introduces carefully selected, edited, and annotated texts from a breathtakingly broad range of primary sources that will be integral to future scholarship and teaching. This is an anthology that is aware of how important the anthology has been to modernism, or as they put it, how “this process of assemblage and collection, of triage and sorting, has been central to the history of modernism’s reception.” In this way the volume, both in its editorial choices and its expert critical essays, offers a radical shift away from the discipline’s preoccupation with defining modernism, and instead aims to present an archive from which we might begin to understand the ways in which modernism has been differently understood around the world. As such it also seeks to “go beyond merely gesturing to the existence of modernists around the world, to defend the value of ‘global modernism’ as a critical hermeneutic.” The anthology begins with the brilliant and provocative “Ten Theses on Global Modernism”, providing a thematic “Alternate Table of Contents” with categories ranging from “Political and Social Formations” to “Artistic Movements and Styles” and “Institutions and Social Conditions of the Field.” In addition to drawing on Moody and Ross’s expertise, the volume also features vital and enlightening contributions of invited scholars as section editors and translators. Global Modernists on Modernism is the result of immense scholarship and will prove a model for future editions; for modernist literary studies it will be no less than indispensable, deftly transforming considerations of the literary, historical, and geographical scope of modernism.
https://msa.press.jhu.edu/prize/shortlist_edition.html

“Etel Adnan’s life has been marked by constant movement: across oceans and continents, between languages, both literal and artistic . . . A creative polyglot, she has produced paintings, drawings, tapestries, multiple volumes of poetry and essays, and Sitt Marie-Rose (1977), one of the most important novels about the Lebanese civil war, in a career spanning over six decades. Light’s New Measure borrows its title from a poem in the 2012 collection Sea and Fog, gesturing to the dialogue between Adnan’s artwork and her poetry. Indeed, it would be impossible to think about her art practice as separate from her literary pursuits, especially since a persistent struggle with language(s) frames her experience of both the literary and visual,” writes Assistant Professor of Arabic Dina Ramadan in a review of the artist’s first major New York museum show. Ramadan describes that “Adnan’s paintings feel immediate in their energy, exploding onto the canvas in a single sitting, thick layers of paint applied directly from the tube. Much like her poetry, they are emotive and experiential, studies of the potential of color and its emotional agency, explorations of its ability to move past the limitations of meaning,” The exhibition Light’s New Measure, which spans Adnan’s prolific career, is on view at the Guggenheim Museum from October 8, 2021 through January 10, 2022.
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/11/artseen/Etel-Adnan-Lights-New-Measure

“Author Lucy Sante is at an interesting point in her life, looking backward and forward simultaneously,” writes Bob Krasner for the Villager. “With the release of her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she has gathered together pieces that form a kind of memoir—even in the fiction that weaves in and out of the examinations of music, art, tabloids, photography and her life in the East Village many years ago. Between the creation of this book and its actual publication, Sante has entered a new phase of her life [...] In her mid-60’s, Sante has recently come out as transgender, changed her name and is happily living her life with a new set of pronouns.” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
https://www.amny.com/new-york/manhattan/the-villager/east-village-author-weaves-together-fiction-and-memoir-in-new-collection-of-essays/

Justus Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus of Languages & Literature and Visiting Professor of Literature, died at home in Annandale on October 30, 2021, having celebrated his 100th birthday on January 23, 2021.  

Born to a Jewish family in Danzig (Gdańsk), Poland, he was sent to study in France by parents fearful of, as his father remarked, the “evil wind” of Nazism. Once the Nazis occupied Paris, Justus had to leave the Sorbonne, and, set adrift, was forced to fend for himself.  The blond “Aryan-looking” young man, barely twenty years of age, was fluent in German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian and French; his love of languages saved his life, and, later, as a scholar of translation, inspired his vocation. 

Justus made his way to Marseille and the Emergency Rescue Committee, led by American journalist and fervent anti-Nazi Varian Fry. Working as a courier, delivering coded messages and intercepting communications across enemy lines, Justus was soon escorting well-known émigré writers and intellectuals, among them Heinrich Mann Franz Werfel and many others, through the treacherous Pyrenees to safety in Spain.

For his heroic service (which included many near misses and serious wounds) later in the war in aid of the U.S. Army, Justus received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and in 2017, the French ambassador to the United States decorated him as a Commandeur in the Légion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest distinctions. 

After a number of stateless years, Justus emigrated to the United States in 1946. After receiving a Ph.D., Justus arrived at Bard in 1962, where he taught European literature and many languages to generations of Bard students. Professor and distinguished poet Robert Kelly, in his eulogy of Justus, speaks of the “humble heroics of making sure that today’s students do not lose sight of, or lose faith in, the great humanistic structure of European civilization.” We note as well that Justus also taught courses in the literature of India, China and various countries in Africa. 

In January 2020, Justus published The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir.  “Justus was one of the last witnesses of the Holocaust,” writes President Leon Botstein in his eulogy of our beloved colleague. “His death, after a long and productive life is a call to honor his long service—his contributions as a teacher and writer—by resolving to remember, more than ever before, the events of history he was part of and the courage and commitments to freedom, tolerance, justice, learning, and respect for all human life he displayed.” 

With the devoted care of his wife, Karin, Justus stayed active until almost the very end—planning courses, excited as always by the prospect of awakening Bard students to the riches of great works by revered authors, and the humane values embedded in major artistic achievement. 

Trim, dapper, an avid (and very competitive!) tennis player, Justus was both worldly and modest.  In his memoir he asks, “So how do we explain the fact that this child of Jewish parents in Danzig survived Hitler and concentration camps, bullet wounds and land-mine blasts, and then found his way from those stateless, uncertain years in war-torn Europe to this long and purposeful life in America?” Luck, he says, most certainly had something to do with it.  Yet, “Time and time again,” he tells us, “there was what I call ‘a confluence of circumstances’ that presented me with a window of opportunity, or a moment to be seized. At each juncture, a combination of factors enabled me to seize that moment or slip through that window.  That’s my best explanation for how I survived.”

That he did so has been an inestimable gift to all of us at Bard. In the spirit of the Jewish tradition in which he was raised, “May his memory be a blessing.”

By Sophie Kautenburger ’23

Where can studying ancient languages lead? Great places: just ask three Bard Classics majors who spent the summer of 2021 pursuing their academic passions at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Senior Em Setzer ’22 completed a paid internship at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), a research facility, library, and cultural center based in Washington, DC that attracts scholars, students, and artists from all over the world. Setzer contributed to The Open Greek and Latin Project, an international collaboration committed to creating a free digital corpus of Greek and Latin texts. Setzer managed a team of about 20 volunteers who edited the data output of digitized Greek texts for two major online platforms: the First Thousand Years of Greek Project and the Perseus Digital Library. Setzer’s work added new material to these open source projects, which significantly contribute to the worldwide accessibility of the study of ancient Greece and Rome.
 
Bard Classics senior Isabella Spagnuolo ’22 won a fully funded internship at the University of Chicago in the Leadership Alliance’s 2021 Summer Research Early Identification Program (SR-EIP). SR-EIP is a highly selective summer research experience designed for undergraduates interested in pursuing a PhD. During the nine-week program, Spagnuolo was mentored by Michèle Lowrie (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago); took courses in academic skills and professional development; and developed an independent research project. Spagnuolo used the summer to explore echoes of dance in Horace’s Odes, a collection of Roman poetry composed in the first century BCE. Her work allowed her to combine her expertise in Classics with her own experience as an accomplished dancer; she plans to continue this research in her Senior Project at Bard.
 
Sophomore Jade Dinkins ’24 was awarded a scholarship to study at Harvard Summer School, the oldest academic summer program in the United States. In seven short weeks, she learned ancient Greek from scratch and translated adaptations of works by Euripides, Lysias, Herodotus, and Aristophanes. The experience was grueling but rewarding. “I found all of the pieces which I read to be equally as engaging as they were academically challenging,” Dinkins recounted, “which made it a true treat to translate every single one of them. Both of my professors brought so much enthusiasm to each lesson as well, and that allowed me to wake up every morning feeling eager to learn as much ancient Greek as I possibly could that day. They explained beautifully the language’s major influence on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the West, offering a well-rounded perspective on the history of the language, which is something that I really appreciate when learning something new.” Dinkins successfully completed her summer scholarship studies in time for the start of Bard’s fall semester, which sees her reading Homer in Bard’s intermediate ancient Greek class. 

“These fantastic achievements are a testament to our students’ talents and hard work,” said Lauren Curtis, associate professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. “We are so proud of them! All these different summer projects and internships, from language study to leadership training and research, show how many exciting opportunities the study of the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds can open up.”

Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature and Visiting Professor of Literature Justus Rosenberg passed away, surrounded by family, on Saturday, October 30, 2021 at the age of 100. 

In a letter to the Bard community, President Leon Botstein memorialized Rosenberg’s life: 

Justus was one of the last witnesses of the Holocaust. As a member of the French Resistance he was also a hero in the fight against fascism. His death, after a long and productive life is a call to honor his long service—his contributions as a teacher and writer—by resolving to remember, more than ever before, the events of history he was part of and the courage and commitments to freedom, tolerance, justice, learning, and respect for all human life he displayed. All of us at Bard owe him a debt of gratitude for his many years of teaching, his friendship, and the eloquent writings he penned.

Justus Rosenberg was born to a Jewish family in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland) in 1921. He was a legendary teacher who started teaching at Bard in 1962. Although he retired formally in 1992, he accepted a post-retirement appointment to rejoin the faculty offered to him by Stuart Levine, who was then Dean of the College. In 2020, he published The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir. This book recounts his service to the French Resistance during World War II. Justus not only survived the war, unlike many in his family, but by joining the fight against Nazis he was doubly at risk as a Jew and as a member of the Resistance. For his wartime service, Justus received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and in 2017 the French ambassador to the United States personally made Rosenberg a Commandeur in the Légion d’Honneur, among France’s highest decorations, for his heroism during World War II.

Justus emigrated to the United States. After finishing his PhD, he chose a career in undergraduate teaching, first at Swarthmore, and then at Bard. He taught literature and many languages, notably French, German, Russian, Yiddish, and, from time to time, even Polish. He was a loyal friend to Peter Sourian, and until not too long ago, an avid player of tennis, particularly with the late Jean French, Professor of Art History. In recent decades, Justus was very active promoting causes dedicated to tolerance and the fight against prejudice and hate.

Students who were fortunate enough to take his classes had the rare opportunity to study with a scholar who was also a witness to history. The Nazi genocide of European Jewry has receded from memory and become a more distant object of history. Bard students, however, had the opportunity to be in the presence of an individual who could testify to what happened.The denial of the truth of the persecution and annihilation of European Jewry has, astonishingly, persisted. Justus Rosenberg survived and witnessed the unimaginable. Yet he tirelessly and eloquently demonstrated reasons for hope. Despite suffering and loss, Justus sustained an unrelenting commitment to literature, the arts, philosophy, the traditions of science, and the making of art; for him they revealed the possibilities of human renewal shared by all and transcended the differences among us. For Justus, learning and study were instruments of redemption, remembrance, and reconciliation. He possessed a magnetic capacity to inspire the love of learning.

It was a miracle that Justus fulfilled the well-known birthday greeting of the nation of his birth that calls for "100 years" of life. Justus reached that milestone, against all odds. In Poland, the country of his birth, just under 3 million Jews, nearly 90 percent of all Polish Jews, were murdered between 1939 and 1945.

A graveside funeral was held on Sunday, October 31 at the Bard College Cemetery with a reception at the President's House following the ceremony. A Shiva is taking place during the week. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that contributions be made to the Justus Rosenberg Memorial Fund at Bard College, whose objective is to create an endowed chair in comparative literature in his name at the College.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/nyregion/professor-justus-rosenberg-has-a-past.html

“In the rift between secularism and churchgoing, Jonathan Franzen has set his sixth and latest novel, Crossroads, the first in what promises to be three linked novels under the broad banner A Key to All Mythologies (the title alludes to Middlemarch and an uncompleted work of Christian philosophy by that book’s insufferable Rev. Casaubon),” writes Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason in the Wall Street Journal. “Like all Mr. Franzen’s novels, Crossroads burrows into the walls behind which a group of people endure the particularly excruciating form of self-flagellation we call family life. The Probsts, the Hollands, the Lamberts, the Berglunds, the Tylers: Mr. Franzen’s fictional families from his earlier novels are now joined by the Hildebrandts, very unhappy in their own way, and very conflicted in their relationships with Mainline Protestant ideas of ‘goodness.’”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/crossroads-novel-jonathan-franzen-review-god-country-swinging-70s-11633542872

Author Lindsey Drager has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc Books 2019). Drager’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2022 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Drager will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Lindsey Drager’s wonderfully innovative novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings, takes its readers on an elliptical, speculative, philosophically intrepid journey that tracks the evolution of the old folktale, Hansel and Gretel, between 1378 and 2365, even as it redefines and revises our sense of what narrative itself can achieve,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “As Halley’s Comet revisits the Earth every seventy-five years, like some cosmic metronome, we encounter the siblings Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Johannes Gutenberg and his sister, and twin space probes searching the galaxy for a sister planet to our own. As we do, we witness the many ways in which Hansel and Gretel themselves are transformed along with the human experience their tale portrays. Intimate in its understanding of the multiplicities of love, here is an elegantly succinct work of art that is flat-out epic in scope. And while one may look to Borges, Calvino, Winterson, even the Terrence Malik of Tree of Life for comparison, Drager’s vision is breathtakingly original and The Archive of Alternate Endings displays the confident technique and wild inventiveness of an already accomplished literary artist emerging into virtuosity.”

“I am so very, very grateful for the opportunity to spend a semester engaging with the literary community at Bard. It is a privilege to be listed among the extraordinary novelists and short story writers honored with this prize in the past,” said Drager. “For me, much of writing is about ongoing, long-term self-doubt, so support and recognition like this is simply invaluable. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the Bard Fiction Prize committee for seeing something in this strange book.”

Lindsey Drager is the author of three novels: The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc 2015), The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc 2017), and The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc 2019). Her books have won a John Gardner Fiction Award and a Shirley Jackson Award; been listed as a “Best Book of the Year” in The Guardian and NPR; and twice been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A Spanish language edition of her second book was published this year in Spain, and an Italian edition of The Archive of Alternate Endings is forthcoming. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Prose, she is currently the associate fiction editor of the literary journal West Branch and an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Utah.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Akil Kumarasamy for her debut story collection, Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018).
https://www.bard.edu/bfp/

Conjunctions:77, States of Play Features New Work from Ranjit Hoskote, David Shields, Nam Le, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Sze, Nathaniel Mackey, Shelley Jackson, Charles Bernstein, Tracie Morris, and Many Others

“The invitation to join in games,” proposes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow, “be they fun word games or lethal war games, games of chance or games of dexterity, umpired games or games in which the rules morph and cheaters prevail—is one we face, however joyfully, however subtly, however violently, every day of our lives.” Conjunctions:77, States of Play—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College, which is now celebrating its Fortieth Anniversary of continuous publication—gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers who are willing, through their writing, to invoke one of the oldest, most audacious questions one mortal can put to another: “Do you want to play a game?” Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, States of Play features a collection of poems by celebrated Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote, a short story by international bestseller David Shields, poems by PEN/Malamud Award winner Nam Le, a new short story by Jerusalem Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates, new poems from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze, a new series of genre-bending work from cross-genre experimental writer Shelley Jackson, a new poem from National Book Award and Bollingen Prize winner Nathaniel Mackey, and a collaborative duet between Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, two of the most revered voices in American poetry.

Sometimes we’re compelled to play whether we want to or not. Now and then we end up playing solitaire. But even when we are sidelined and have no clear way to participate, the games go on without us and as often as not affect us in ways difficult to predict or define. Writes Morrow, “For those looking for fun and games in States of Play, be warned that the losses pile up as fast as the wins.”

Additional contributors to States of Play include Joanna Scott, John Darcy, Heather Altfeld, Kyoko Mori, James Morrow, Catherine Imbriglio, Pierre Reverdy, Robin Hemley, Anelise Chen, S. P. Tenhoff, Lowry Pressly, Cole Swensen, Rae Armantrout, Lucas Southworth, Kelsey Peterson, John Dimitroff, Alyssa Pelish, Tim Raymond, Justin Noga, Brian Evenson, and Kate Colby.

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019, and The Best American Short Stories 2021.
http://www.conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions77

Akil Kumarasamy, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, October 4. This event is free but registration, proof of vaccination, and indoor masking is required. To register, please email [email protected]. The reading begins at 6:30 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. For more information call 845-758-7087.

Kumarasamy received the Bard Fiction Prize for or her debut story collection, Half Gods, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Kumarasamy’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2021 semester, during which time she is continuing her writing and meeting informally with students. 

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life. While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”

“I’m very excited to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and to be part of the Bard community,” said Kumarasamy. “This has been such a whirlwind of a year, and, during these very uncertain times, I’m grateful for the support and the committee’s belief in my work. Really thrilled by the opportunity.”
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Author Clare Beams for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016).
 

Michael Sadowski’s memoir, Men I’ve Never Been, recounts his shunning of his queer identity and sexuality as a boy in order to become the man society wants him to be—“bringing to light the kinds of lies we tell ourselves about our identities, and the price of maintaining them.” Sadowski is interim dean of graduate studies, director of inclusive pedagogy and curriculum, and associate professor in the Bard MAT Program. James Romm “has written a tale of the greatest military corps during the last decades of ancient Greek freedom—The Sacred Band, a unit 300 strong composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.” Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. 
https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/reading-list-6-books-to-read-in-july-2021/Content?oid=13289075

On July 7, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, will host an online evening of readings to celebrate the publication of the fortieth anniversary issue of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College. Morrow will be joined by Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue contributors Fred D’Aguiar, Samuel R. Delany, Ann Lauterbach, and Sofia Samatar. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Elliott Bay Book Company, takes place Wednesday, July 7, at 8 p.m. For reservations, please click here.

ABOUT THE ISSUE

Published by Bard College in spring 2021, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue celebrates forty years in print, with new and previously unpublished work by Ben Okri, Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Ann Lauterbach, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Akil Kumarasamy, John Ashbery, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Richard Powers, Shane McCrae, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Jessica Campbell, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carole Maso, Julia Alvarez, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sanjena Sathian, Peter Orner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Diane Williams, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and Robert Coover, with a foreword by Rick Moody.


ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Fred D’Aguiar’s books include the novel Children of Paradise, the poetry collection Letters to America, and the forthcoming memoir, Year of Plagues.

In 2016, Samuel R. Delany was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. His books include the Return to Neveryon series; an autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water; and the paired essays Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Ann Lauterbach’s tenth poetry collection, Spell, was published by Penguin. She is David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, and has been a contributing editor to Conjunctions since 1984.

Sofia Samatar is the author of four books, most recently Monster Portraits. Her fiction has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. Her memoir, The White Mosque, is forthcoming from Catapult Books.

Bradford Morrow is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.

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The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions showcases innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit http://www.conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected]](6.22.21)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/conjunctions-76-the-fortieth-anniversary-issue-reading-tickets-159721179347

On Friday June 25, author, educator, classicist, tattooer, and Bard College alumnus Phuc Tran ’95 will give a book talk in honor of World Refugee Day. Tran’s talk is presented by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, the Office of the President, and Alumni/ae Affairs, along with the OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives. This special event, which takes place at 5 p.m. EDT, will be moderated by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. Join via Zoom link.

Phuc Tran ’95, who migrated with his family from Vietnam in 1975, has been a high school Latin teacher for more than 20 years while simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. Tran graduated from Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School and was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine.

Tran’s 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, SIGH, GONE: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction. He tattoos and lives with his family in Portland, Maine.

Bard College has a deep and longstanding history as a sanctuary and refuge for vulnerable populations. Beginning in the mid-1930s and throughout the war years, Bard gave refuge to distinguished writers, artists, intellectuals, and scientists fleeing Nazi Europe. Since the 1980s, Bard has brought scholars at risk from Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East to teach and do research in Annandale-on-Hudson, and continued its strong commitment to refugees directly through initiatives such as the Bard Sanctuary Fund, which supports undocumented students and refugees by providing scholarship, living, legal, and other necessary support while they are enrolled at Bard.

Bard’s global work to support refugees and advance human rights was strengthened profoundly in 2020 when the College cofounded the Open Society University Network (OSUN) with Central European University and support from the Open Society Foundations. Providing access to students from communities that have faced barriers and exclusion, including incarcerated people, the Roma, refugees, and other displaced groups is a central part of OSUN’s work to make higher education more inclusive and accessible worldwide. Supporting that work, OSUN was elected cochair in 2020 of the Taskforce on Third Country Education Pathways, launched by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. The task force is charged with developing best practices for higher education pathways that respond to the needs of refugees, internally displaced individuals, and others displaced by crises across the globe.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
 

In 1981, the price of a first-class stamp rose from 15 cents to 20, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, MTV started broadcasting, the first space shuttle, Columbia, was launched, the AIDS virus was identified, and Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. Nineteen eighty-one was also the year that twenty-something Bradford Morrow founded and edited the first issue of a literary journal called Conjunctions. Since Conjunctions:1 brought together Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Octavio Paz, Josephine Miles, John Hawkes, and dozens of others,  the journal has published nearly two thousand writers—some avowed masters, some at the beginnings of their careers. As Morrow notes with pride, Conjunctions has featured debut and very early appearances in print by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, William T. Vollmann, Can Xue, Forrest Gander, Brian Evenson, Chinelo Okparanta, Shelley Jackson, Mary Caponegro, Jim Crace, Martine Bellen, H. G. Carrillo, Nam Le, Robert Antoni, Raven Lelani, Vanessa Chan, and many others like Ben Okri, Julia Elliott, Karen Russell, and Isabella Hammad, who are included in the latest issue, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue (spring, 2021). The recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, Conjunctions continues to forge ahead some three decades after Bard College became its publisher, and four since it first saw the light of day.

In his Editor’s Note, novelist and Bard Literature Professor Morrow celebrates many moments across Conjunctions’ four decades, among them, trading ideas about starting a literary magazine with poet Kenneth Rexroth in the latter’s converted barn library, a launch party hosted by the Gotham Book Mart, an interview with Chinua Achebe in his modest home in Annandale for Conjunctions’ tenth anniversary issue, and the day he was “mesmerized by a story titled ‘Good Old Neon’ sent by a polite young guy named David Foster Wallace.”

“The way I wanted to set off into the future was by honoring the past, in particular one of my publishing heroes, James Laughlin, who had founded New Directions—home to Rexroth, Pound, Williams, Stein, et al.—and provided me with an informal education like no other,” says Morrow, winner of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing a Literary Journal. “As I’ve written before, Conjunctions is a living notebook, one in which new voices, along with those of writers who are further along on their journeys, enrich and complicate the flow of literature. Even heralded masters were once unknown fledglings. And all are engaged in the difficult feat of gathering words, those everyday haggard incandescent things, into a poem or story or essay, part of an inspired and necessary continuum of which we’re honored to be a part.”

Longtime Conjunctions contributor Rick Moody writes, in the foreword to the Fortieth Anniversary Issue, that “it is not outrageous to say that [Conjunctions] is the best literary magazine in the United States of America” and praises Morrow for his editorial vision and unwavering leadership and support.

“At no time in these decades did I ever fail to know well the support of Bradford Morrow, nor did he ever forbear noting when I was not doing the job terribly well and could do better,” writes Moody. “And in this way did I always feel that I had a home in these pages, a situation I know is shared by many, many other writers, all of us feeling that we could rely on Conjunctions for its welcome, its standards, its consistent excellence, as a place that would take our furthest-out fancies, but also provide a consistently astounding residence, containing a worldview, an idea of literature, a confraternity of the surprising and original.”

Edited by Morrow, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue features hybrid fiction by Booker Prize–winning poet and novelist Ben Okri; a portfolio of poems by MacArthur fellow Ann Lauterbach; a short story by Pulitzer Prize recipient Richard Powers, and new writing by Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, John Ashbery, Shane McCrae, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Julia Alvarez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Peter Orner, Diane Williams, and Robert Coover. Additional contributors to include Akil Kumarasamy, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jessica Campbell, Carole Maso, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Sanjena Sathian, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and cover artist Oliver Lee Jackson.

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2021, 2018, and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, or to arrange interviews with Conjunctions Founding Editor Bradford Morrow please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected].](6.16.21)
http://www.conjunctions.com/

Grace Molinaro ’24, a dual degree Bard Conservatory and Middle Eastern Studies major at Bard College, has been awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic during the summer of 2021. The U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. CLS scholars gain critical language and cultural skills that enable them to contribute to U.S. economic competitiveness and national security. Molinaro is one of nearly 700 competitively selected American students at U.S. colleges and universities who received a CLS award in 2021.

“I feel extremely lucky to have received this scholarship because it will help me develop my ability to better express my thoughts in Arabic and communicate across borders—linguistic, national, cultural, and others,” said Molinaro. “I am hoping it will help me get to know the community in my home area better, since a lot of people speak Arabic, and I especially hope that this experience will give me the skills and tools to communicate, negotiate, and foster understanding through language.”

About the Critical Language Scholarship Program
The Critical Language Scholarship Program provides opportunities to U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to spend eight to ten weeks studying one of 15 critical languages: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, or Urdu. The program includes intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. The CLS Program is developed in partnership with local institutions in countries where these languages are commonly spoken. CLS scholars are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship and apply their critical language skills in their future careers. Since 2006, CLS has awarded scholarships to more than 8,000 American students to learn critical languages around the world. CLS scholars are among the more than 50,000 academic and professional exchange program participants supported annually by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. These exchange programs build respect and positive relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The CLS Program is a program of the U.S. Department of State and is supported in its administration by American Councils for International Education. For more information, visit clscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(6/15/21)

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, has awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Focused on the Big Read selection, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Big Read Hudson Valley, which takes place next March-April, 2022, is a collaboration among Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine, with support from Bard’s Written Arts Program, the Bard Conservatory, and Conjunctions literary journal, along with partner libraries and community organizations, including Radio Kingston, the Kingston Library, the Red Hook Library, Tivoli Library, Starr Library, the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History, Ramapo for Children, Oblong Books, and Rough Draft Bar & Books.

“For 15 years the NEA Big Read has supported opportunities for communities to come together around a book, creating a shared experience that encourages openness and conversations around issues central to our lives,” said Ann Eilers, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “We congratulate all of the new NEA Big Read grantees and look forward to seeing the range of meaningful activities they create for their communities.”

Big Read Hudson Valley is one of 61 grants totaling $1,070,000 supported by NEA Big Read in 2021-2022. The grants, managed by Arts Midwest, will support dynamic community reading programs designed to encourage conversation and discovery, all inspired by a book from the NEA Big Read library. The 2021-2022 NEA Big Read grantees are located in 28 states, with 43 percent of the organizations located in communities with populations under 50,000. Nearly half (44 percent) of the recipients are first-time recipients of an NEA Big Read grant. Each organization is receiving a matching grant ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.

About the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read
The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, a partnership with Arts Midwest, broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Since 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts has funded more than 1,700 NEA Big Read programs, providing more than $23 million to organizations nationwide. In addition, Big Read activities have reached every Congressional district in the country. Over the past 15 years, grantees have leveraged more than $50 million in local funding to support their NEA Big Read programs. More than 5.7 million Americans have attended an NEA Big Read event, over 90,000 volunteers have participated at the local level, and over 40,000 community organizations have partnered to make NEA Big Read activities possible. Visit arts.gov/neabigread for more information about the NEA Big Read, including reader resources—such as book overviews, discussion questions, and interviews with the authors—as well as community stories from past NEA Big Read grantees. Organizations interested in applying for an NEA Big Read grant in the future should visit Arts Midwest’s website for more information.

Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the Arts Endowment supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America. Visit arts.gov to learn more.

Arts Midwest believes that creativity has the power to inspire and unite humanity. Based in Minneapolis, Arts Midwest grows, gathers, and invests in creative organizations and communities throughout the nine-state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. One of six nonprofit United States Regional Arts Organizations, Arts Midwest’s history spans more than 30 years. For more information, visit artsmidwest.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(6/10/21)

Bard alumna Molly Feibel ’15 will compete on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, June 8 at 7:00 pm EST. (Check your local listings as times may vary.) A literature major at Bard, Feibel is now a historic interpreter, working at Clermont State Historic Site and Staatsburgh State Historic Site not far from the Bard campus.
https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/entertainment/2021/06/08/jeopardy-feature-staatsburgs-molly-feibel-tuesday/7583284002/

On June 4, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, hosts an online evening of readings to celebrate the publication of the 40TH anniversary issue of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College. Morrow will be joined by Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue contributors Robert Coover, Akil Kumarasamy, Shane McCrae, and Karen Russell. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Oblong Books, takes place Friday, June 4, at 7 p.m. For reservations, please click here.

Edited by Morrow and published by Bard College in spring 2021, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue celebrates forty years in print, with new and previously unpublished work by Ben Okri, Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Ann Lauterbach, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Akil Kumarasamy, John Ashbery, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Richard Powers, Shane McCrae, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Jessica Campbell, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carole Maso, Julia Alvarez, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sanjena Sathian, Peter Orner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Diane Williams, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and Robert Coover, with a foreword by Rick Moody.
For more information, visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76.

ABOUT THE READERS

Robert Coover has published more than twenty books of fiction and plays, including A Child Again (McSweeney’s, 2005), Noir (Overlook, 2010), The Brunist Day of Wrath (Dzanc, 2014), and Huck Out West (Norton, 2017). He is a pioneer in the field of electronic writing, and founded the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program, at Brown University.
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the story collection Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). She is the 2021 recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize and an Assistant Professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program.

Shane McCrae’s most recent poetry collections are Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block (both Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In 2021, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center will release an expanded edition of his first book, Mule. McCrae has received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award.

Karen Russell’s books include the novella Sleep Donation (Vintage, 2020), the story collection Orange World (Knopf, 2019), and the novel Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award.

Bradford Morrow is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.

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The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions showcases innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit http://www.conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected]](6.2.21)
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/conjunctions-40th/register

Author and Bard College professor Valeria Luiselli has won the 2021 Dublin Literary Award for her novel Lost Children Archive. Sponsored by Dublin City Council, the award, with prize money of €100,000, is the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English. Luiselli is the first writer from Mexico and the fifth woman to claim the prestigious award in its 26-year history. Uniquely, the Dublin Award receives its nominations from public libraries in cities around the globe and recognizes both writers and translators. The winner was announced on Thursday, May 20, at a special online event, at the opening of the International Literature Festival Dublin, which runs until May 30. Lord Mayor Hazel Chu made the announcement from Dublin, with the presentation to the Luiselli taking place at the Irish Consulate in New York City. Irish Consul General Ciarán Madden, and previous winner of the Dublin Literary Award Colm Tóibín, presented Luiselli with her award on behalf of Dublin City Council.

“Lost Children Archive tells an old story, the one that Cervantes told . . . and Cormac McCarthy, the story of what happens to the human spirit on the road, how a long journey puts in jeopardy what was stable and agreed upon,” said Tóibín, who won the Dublin Literary Award in 2006 for his novel The Master. “Luiselli has written a novel in which stories spiral. She has rendered her characters with astonishing grace and insight, and through them she has drawn a picture of what they have been driving towards throughout the book, the contested place, where the old rules do not apply, for which a new form of archive is needed.”

Accepting her award, Luiselli spoke passionately about the importance of literature now more than ever. “I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books–without sharing in the company of other writers’ human experiences –we would not have made it through these months,” she said. “If our spirits have found renewal, if we have found strength to carry on, if we have maintained a sense of enthusiasm for life, it is thanks to the worlds that books have given us. Each time, we found solace in the companions that live in our bookshelves.”

Watch Valeria Luiselli’s acceptance speech HERE.

“This year’s Dublin Literary Award winner is a very important book, with significant themes around family and the things that matter to us most as human beings,” said Lord Mayor of Dublin and Patron of the Award Hazel Chu. “I am very proud of our City for providing this opportunity for the libraries of the world to nominate the books that have resonated most with readers. The Award helps us to learn about each other and reach a greater understanding of the world, through the insight which literature provides.”

About Lost Children Archive
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

About Lucas Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth, which won the 2016 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Sidewalks; and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Lost Children Archive, which won the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize, is her first novel written in English. She lives in New York City.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/21/21)
 

Bard College students Jourdan Perez ’23 and Tallulah Woitach ’23 have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State to study abroad. Perez was awarded $4,500 toward his studies at Bard College Berlin in fall 2021, and Woitach was awarded $4,000 toward her studies at the University of Sydney in Spring 2022.

“It is an unbelievable honor to be selected for such a prestigious award,” said Woitach, a written arts major. “I am so beyond excited to go to Australia to study indigenous culture, with a focus on oral tradition. All too often in western culture, the written word becomes distanced from the deeper ancient energy language is borne out of. I want to learn from those who know how to make words come alive, by connecting to something much greater than ourselves.”

“I'm very excited to explore Berlin and continue studying German language and culture,” said Perez, a sociology major with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. “I would like to thank Trish Fleming (Bard’s Study Abroad Adviser) for informing me about the Gilman Scholarship, as well as reviewing my application one last time before I submitted.”

Perez and Woitach were among more than 1,500 U.S. undergraduate students selected to receive Gilman scholarship awards from the March 2021 application deadline. The recipients of this prestigious scholarship are American undergraduate students attending 467 U.S. colleges and represent all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 96 countries through the end of 2022.

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, providing them with skills critical to our national security and economic prosperity. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,300 U.S. institutions have sent over 33,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 151 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.” The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). For more information, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/24/21)
 

Bard College announces the appointment of Ranjani Atur as the inaugural recipient of the College’s Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship in Classical Studies, effective fall 2021. The newly established fellowship brings to Bard’s liberal arts classroom the cutting-edge research of early-stage teacher-scholars whose work takes the study of Ancient Greece and Rome in important new directions. Recipients of the two-year award will share their research with the Bard College community by teaching interdisciplinary courses connected to their research and by leading events that bring scholarly conversations about the ancient Greek and Roman worlds to the public sphere.

About Ranjani Atur
Ranjani Atur earned her BA in Classical Studies from Georgetown University, 2013, and is completing her PhD in Religious Studies, with an emphasis in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ranjani’s research interests include Greek and Roman religion, early Christianity, and comparative religions across the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and Asia. She is particularly interested in issues of religious materiality, spatiality, and experience. Ranjani has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature (2019, 2020, and 2021 upcoming) and is currently supported by the American Association of University Women, American Dissertation Fellowship.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/11/21)
 

“The goal of this campaign is not to protect cis-girl athletes as much as it is to make trans athletes disappear,” writes Gessen. “This is a movement to exclude trans girls from community and opportunity. It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like those over the presence of lesbians on women’s sports teams. And, just like earlier panics, this one is based on what passes for common sense but is in fact ignorance and hate.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-movement-to-exclude-trans-girls-from-sports

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program profiles Jahari Fraser, a Bard junior and Posse Scholar studying Global and International Studies and Spanish Studies. This semester, Jahari is studying at BGIA and interning at Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and 2020 TED Audacious Project Grant recipient that is applying advanced machine learning and non-invasive robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Some of Jahari’s work will be aimed toward Project CETI’s launch in mid-April, including various research projects and contributing to CETI’s overall organizational development.

The Simpson Literary Project announced today that Bard College Writer in Residence Jenny Offill, author of Weather, has been named a finalist for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Offill and the three other finalists will appear, alongside Joyce Carol Oates, in a live “Meet the Finalists” event on March 30 at 8 p.m. EST. For more information, click here. The recipient of the $50,000 prize is expected to be named in late April.
https://www.simpsonliteraryproject.org/

The Henry Luce Foundation announced today that Evan Tims ’19 has been named a 2021–22 Luce Scholar. The Luce Scholars Program is a nationally competitive fellowship program launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1974 to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society. Tims is one of 18 finalists (chosen from among 164 semifinalists from over 70 participating colleges and universities) selected for the new class of Luce Scholars. After working with Luce in the coming months to choose the organization and country in Asia where he will be placed, he plans to explore the field of climate justice, relationships between nature and culture, and the future-oriented practices of social change, as well as write stories and novels that explore the changing global environment.

“My focus is on finding ways to address the climate crisis through interdisciplinary and intersectional leadership. Despite the unique challenges of COVID-19 this year, I believe that global connectivity and understanding are more critical than ever.” said Tims. “I’m grateful to Luce for the opportunity to follow my curiosity and passion in a completely new sociocultural and geographic context. Given the necessity for international collaboration in combating the climate crisis, Luce provides a critical avenue for developing global connection and understanding.”

Evan Tims ’19 is a police misconduct investigator, climate fiction writer, and researcher. Growing up in coastal Maine, he developed an early interest in the relationship between narrative, social justice, and environmental change. At Bard, Tims received a joint BA degree in human rights and written arts, two fields that allowed him to explore formulations of rights and cultural attentiveness to injustice through a variety of lenses. While at Bard, Evan won two Critical Language Scholarships that funded Bangla studies in Kolkata, India. Tims’s Senior Project explored the intersections between climate and social justice using a combination of experimental fiction and academic research. He received the Bard Written Arts Prize and the Christopher Wise Award in environmentalism and human rights for his thesis, which he later published in shortened form in Mapping Meaning: The Journal. His passion for human rights led him to become an investigator for the Civilian Complaint Review Board of New York City (CCRB), the largest police oversight agency in the United States. Tims ultimately hopes to spend his career addressing the social harm engendered by the climate crisis through the perspective of human rights.

About the Luce Scholars Program
The Luce Scholars Program provides stipends, language training, and individualized professional placement in Asia for 15-18 Luce Scholars each year, and welcomes applications from college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals in a variety of fields who have had limited exposure to Asia. The program, open to both U.S. citizens and permanent residents, is unique among American-Asian exchanges in that it is intended for young leaders who have had limited experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia. For more information, visit hluce.org/programs/luce-scholars. Bard students interested in applying to the Luce Scholars Program should contact the Dean of Studies Office at [email protected].

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(2/19/21)
 

On February 26, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College, hosts an evening of readings and performances with some of the contributors to Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude. This issue gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers far and wide who respond to the deficits of quarantine, self-isolation, and distancing. Morrow will be joined by contributors Sandra Cisneros and Henry Cisneros, Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, and Barbara Tran. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Elliott Bay Book Company, takes place Friday, February 26, at 8 p.m. For reservations, please click here.

Edited by Morrow, Dispatches from Solitude features two previously unpublished poem-songs by Sandra Cisneros; fiction by the late H. G. Carrillo; and new writing by Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, Barbara Tran, Forrest Gander, Helena María Viramontes, Bennett Sims, Anne Waldman, Colin Channer, Rikki Ducornet, Kyoko Mori, John Yau, Charles Bernstein, Marc Anthony Richardson, Michael Ives, Rick Moody, and many others. In his Editor’s Note, Morrow describes how plans for an entirely different fall issue, States of Play, were dashed as the coronavirus pandemic took over.

“As hundreds, then thousands, began to die—among them dear friends of mine, such as Conjunctions donor Jay Hanus and longtime contributor H. G. Carrillo—New York and other cities were forced into lockdown,” writes Morrow. “COVID-19 became the daily and nightly shadow that fell across our lives. Amid this harrowing outbreak, another, more urgent theme for the fall Conjunctions became imperative, one where we might gather writing from those who were compelled to change their daily routines, even reevaluate what their work and lives meant to them. Contributions didn’t necessarily have to be about the pandemic, as such, but shaped by its constraints, by the terrors and courage it has provoked.”

Additional contributors to Dispatches from Solitude include Jane Pek, Meredith Stricker, David Ryan, Gillian Conoley, Yxta Maya Murray, Vanessa Chan, Cyan James, Clare Beams, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Alyssa Pelish, Erin L. McCoy, Alan Rossi, John Darcy, Rae Armantrout, Sylvia Legris, and Susan Daitch.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and visual artist whose work explores the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She will be joined by her brother Henry Cisneros, who has set her poetry from Dispatches to music.

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel The Removed (Ecco, Feb 2021); Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press), a 2019 National Book Award finalist; and other books. An assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University, he also teaches in the low-res MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of poetry collections Late Arcade, Nod House and Blue Fasa (all New Directions), and Lay Ghost (Black Ocean). He edits the literary magazine Hambone.

Bradford Morrow (editor) is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.

Barbara Tran is a poet, with writing published or forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In spring 2021, her first poem film will tour with a Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network exhibition.
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The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions75. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected]]

(2.8.21)
 
http://www.conjunctions.com/

Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, reviews Yara El-Sherbini's Forms of Regulation and Control at the Cue Art Foundation in New York for Art-agenda. “The first US solo exhibition for British-born, Santa Barbara–based El-Sherbini, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, is an elegant rejoinder to the din of recent months,” Ramadan writes. “Deftly weaponizing humor through a series of discreet interventions, it challenges the so-called ‘unconscious’ bias that permeates even the most seemingly benign forms of knowledge and their production.”
https://www.art-agenda.com/features/362909/yara-el-sherbini-s-forms-of-regulation-and-control

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern. James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, writes for the New York Review of Books, reviewing A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74 by Steve Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth by Jodi Magness (Princeton University Press, 2019).
 
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/what-happened-at-masada/

Rogers, a visiting associate professor of writing at Bard College, “assembles an exquisite array of diverse voices united by a shared love of birding” (Publishers Weekly). Each essay explores birding “as an art of wanderlust and extreme patience while highlighting varied species, in habitats from the shoreline of the Sargasso Sea in Bermuda (where Jenn Dean describes how the cahow, a species thought extinct since the 17th century, was rediscovered in the 20th) to the North Dakota prairie (where Richard Bohannon considers the Baird’s sparrow and the Sprague’s pipit, both small, unremarkable-looking species known in the birding world as LBJs, or ‘little brown jobs’).”
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5017-5091-5