News

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 bfp@bard.edu. 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 conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu](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 conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu.](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.

 #
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 conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu](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 studies@bard.edu.

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 conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu]

(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

Bard faculty members Omar Encarnación and Masha Gessen spoke as part of PEN America’s Town Hall on “Reckoning and Reconciliation in Biden’s America," held as the centerpiece of the organization’s virtual annual general meeting on January 26, 2021. Encarnación and Gessen joined PEN America President Ayad Akhtar, historian Jill Lepore, and columnists Charles Blow and Peggy Noonan for this timely and wide-ranging discussion moderated by PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel. Omar G. Encarnación is professor of political studies at Bard. Masha Gessen is distinguished writer in residence at the College.
https://pen.org/event/annual-general-meeting-reckoning-and-reconciliation-in-bidens-america/

“The trauma imposed by these land seizures is still felt, even as nearly nine million people depend daily on the water system,” the series introduction states. “New York’s reservoirs exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures, while the stories of their making emphasize divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty, the potentials and risks inherent in large-scale environmental intervention.”
https://placesjournal.org/series/reservoir-nature-culture-infrastructure/?cn-reloaded=1

Bard College announces the appointment of esteemed writer Dinaw Mengestu as John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor in the Humanities, effective spring 2021. Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, is director of the Written Arts Program at Bard. He is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014). For more information about Bard’s Written Arts Program, please visit writtenarts.bard.edu.

“A writer of extraordinary accomplishment and humanity, Dinaw Mengestu has brought signal openness, growth, and energy to the Written Arts Program at Bard since his arrival in 2016,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre D’Albertis.

Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. His fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and New York Times. Mengestu was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation and was named on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. He is also the recipient of a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. He is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things, That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014). His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Mengestu has a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He has been at Bard since 2016.

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 160-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.12/17/20
 
https://writtenarts.bard.edu/

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 conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu](12.1.20)
 
http://www.conjunctions.com/

Author Akil Kumarasamy has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut story collection, Half Gods, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Kumarasamy’s one-semester residency at Bard College is scheduled for the 2021–22 academic year, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kumarasamy will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“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,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “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 a writer from New Jersey and 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 longstanding 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).

About the Bard Fiction Prize
The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded to a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a $30,000 cash award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students. To apply, candidates should write a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard and submit a CV, along with three copies of the published book they feel best represents their work. No manuscripts will be accepted. Applications for the 2022 prize must be received by June 15, 2021. For information about the Bard Fiction Prize, call 845-758-7087, send an e-mail to bfp@bard.edu, or visit bard.edu/bfp. Applicants may also request information by writing to: Bard Fiction Prize, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000.

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 160-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.12/1/20
 
https://www.bard.edu/bfp/

Conjunctions, the celebrated literary magazine published by Bard College, has been awarded a 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Since 2018, a total of 13 literary magazines have won this prize for excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community. Conjunctions has propelled literature forward for four decades by publishing groundbreaking fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction that marry visionary imagination with formally innovative execution. Each issue illuminates a complex theme—such as exile, desire, the body, or climate change—in a book-length format that gives space to long-form work and a multitude of perspectives. From its home in Bard College, Conjunctions and its founding editor, Bradford Morrow, have earned recognition for uplifting both new writers and contemporary masters who challenge convention.

“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,” the Whiting judges commented. “Its longevity is a testament to its cultural staying power. Organized around a unifying idea, each issue stitches together work by storytellers and scholars to create a fluid and expansive survey of our most pressing human concerns.”

“The 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize could not have come at a more significant time for Conjunctions, which will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in the coming year,” said Bradford Morrow, Editor of Conjunctions and professor of literature at Bard. “The pandemic has inflicted unprecedented challenges on all of us, including literary journals and writers, and thanks to the Whiting Foundation, Conjunctions will be able to continue publishing both our print and online journals without interruption. This grant will enable us to broaden and deepen our ongoing search for innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and multi-genre works by those who write fearlessly, and greatly strengthen our outreach to those who, as we at Conjunctions like to say, read dangerously.”

Morrow gave special thanks to those who supported Conjunctions’ Whiting application. “I want to take the opportunity also to express my gratitude to our former managing editor, Nicole Nyhan, for all her hard work on the application to the Whiting Foundation,” he said. “And to the three writers who shall remain unnamed, my thanks for graciously writing letters of support on our behalf.”

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes were launched in 2018 to acknowledge, reward, and encourage the publications that are actively nurturing the writers who tell us, through their art, what is important. The purpose of the prizes is first and foremost to recognize excellence, and also to help outstanding magazines reach new audiences, find new sources of revenue, and travel the path to sustainability and growth. The matching grants in years two and three are intended to give these publications enough runway to make serious progress toward achieving these goals. For more information about the Whiting Foundation, visit whiting.org.

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. The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.” 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/conjunctions74. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, 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 primoff@bard.edu.]
 
http://www.conjunctions.com/

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”
https://www.gilmanscholarship.org/program/program-overview/

Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah is among the 276 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors who have been elected this year as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Farah joins one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies, whose members include winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Shaw Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, and Oscars, among others. Founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good, the academy is a center for independent policy research and continues to dedicate itself to recognizing excellence and relying on expertise—both of which seem more important than ever. Celebrating its 240th anniversary this year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected more than 13,500 members have been elected since its founding.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

Nuruddin Farah is a Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature,  “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (New York Times). Educated at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Works include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, plays. In recent years he has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Wilson
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
https://amacad.org

For the spring 2020 publication of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run translation magazine, Bard Classical Studies senior Kaitlin Karmen submitted translations for the three ancient languages that she studied at Bard: Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. She writes, "For Ancient Greek, I translated a passage from Thucydides's History on the social effects of the plague that afflicted Athens in the fifth century. My Latin submission was a passage from Lucretius's epic poem De Rerum Natura, where the poet seeks to show that the world is mortal. And my Sanskrit translation was of a short section from the Bhagavad-Gita (itself a section of the Mahabharata), which describes Krishna's revealing of his divine form to Arjuna.” ​​​​​​
https://suigeneris.bard.edu/

Aven Williams is a sophomore at Bard with a joint major in Literature and Middle Eastern Studies. She is back home in Vermont now, and keeping herself busy with course work, family time, and just reading for pleasure. She finds joy in being together with the whole family, as they work through this hard time as a team. They often play board games or watch movies together—the Lord of the Rings series is a family favorite.

Aven's family loves to come together over a good meal. "My mom is a really good cook," Aven says, "so food is big for us!" The family has been cooking together, including recently homemade pizza, cod and lobster soup, and tofu curry with naan.

The pandemic has brought Aven and her extended family together, as well; they're keeping in touch by blogging about their day-to-day lives. Aven also stays in touch with her host family in Paris, from when she studied abroad during her gap year. This crisis has allowed them to talk more and feel more connected as they all face many of the same challenges. "I feel like we are able to be more empathetic toward each other," Aven says.

Aven tries to incorporate some of her life at Bard into her new routine at home. She is looking forward to joining the new Bard Bookworm Club, which has started meeting online. She misses playing with the Bard Frisbee team but she enlists her family to play in their backyard. 

Aven finds hope and connection in social media. "I can see that everyone is coming together. I've been enjoying online concerts, too." Overall Aven is “proud of how Vermont is handling the crisis” and she loves that she is able to connect with her friends on apps such as House Party, which allows large video calls and the ability to play games together. Aven is not taking her time home for granted and she is grateful to have a loving support system in her family and her Bard community. 
 

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen as Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Gessen, who joins the faculty in fall 2020, will teach courses through the Written Arts Program that integrate literature, writing, and contemporary culture and politics. “Masha Gessen is one of the most essential voices in our cultural landscape. They bring an invaluable perspective as a writer whose work sits at the intersection of literature and global politics. We are thrilled to welcome them into the Bard community,” says Dinaw Mengestu, professor of written arts and Director of the Written Arts Program.

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of eleven books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy, which will be published in June. Gessen’s previous book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Nieman Fellow, and has received an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. Gessen has taught at Amherst College and Oberlin College. They live in New York City.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen to the faculty.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lena Di


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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; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 159-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.
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Bard College Writer in Residence Valeria Luiselli has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship for her work in fiction. Luiselli is among the 175 winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 96th competition for the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3000 applicants. The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the fellowship program. 2020 Fellows are drawn from 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 78 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces.

More than 40 Bard faculty members have received Guggenheim fellowships to date. Previous recipients from Bard College include Mark Danner, Ittai Weinryb, Nancy Shaver, Lothar Osterburg, Peggy Ahwesh, JoAnne Akalaitas, Peter Hutton, Ann Lauterbach, An-My Lê, Norman Manea, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bradford Morrow, Judy Pfaff, Luc Sante, Stephen Shore, Mona Simpson, and Joan Tower.

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the books of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the American Academy for Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and the Folio Prize. It was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the NBCC award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her literary work has been translated to over 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. Luiselli has worked as a volunteer translator in the Federal Immigration court, translating testimonies of asylum-seeking undocumented minors, and conducted creative writing workshops in a detention center for undocumented minors. She has taught at Bard College since 2019 and is working on a sound piece about violence against land and bodies in the borderlands.
About the Guggenheim Fellowship Program
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards, and other important, internationally recognized honors. The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. New and continuing donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue its historic mission. The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation is once again underwriting the Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, and a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music is supporting supplemental grants for composers. For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.gf.org.
https://www.gf.org

Robert Cioffi, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, recently spoke at an online Open House for the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., where he is currently a fellow. He led a presentation and discussion on the timely topic of ;“Disease and Social Order: The Plague Narratives of Thucydides and Lucretius,” which was live streamed on YouTube.

For the upcoming summer of 2020 (or 2021, depending on COVID-19), Bard College Classical Studies Major Em Setzer ’22 has been awarded a Digital Humanities Internship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute for Classics in Washington, D.C. As an intern, Em will reside in D.C. at the Center, and over the course of eight weeks, will work on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project and on the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri. Congratulations, Em!

On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. 
 
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=16614

Using Orwell’s Down and Out to Understand and Write Histories of Homelessness Then and Now 

Bard College presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with Nick Crowson, Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The lecture takes place in the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium (Room 103) of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation on Tuesday, February 18, at 4:45 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
 
What does George Orwell's classic account of homeless living in London during the interwar years offer the historian? Where should we locate this semi-fictionalised account in the tradition of the incognito social investigator? Professor Crowson's lecture will address these questions and ask how Orwell helps us understand the physical manifestations of homelessness in modern Britain. In doing so, he shows how historians can play a crucial role in facilitating better, historically-informed public discourse around homelessness.

Nick Crowson holds the Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The author and editor of many books, including Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40; Britain and Europe: A Political History since 1918; and A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945, he is writing a new history of homelessness in modern Britain seeking to integrate the lived experience with the policy responses. His research is widely used by a range of policy and cultural organisations, including Crisis, Shelter, the Museum of Homelessness and the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company.

This annual lecture forms part of the endowment of the Chair in British History and Literature that was established in 2010 to commemorate Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first President of the World Bank. The endowment has given Bard the opportunity to extend its commitment to teaching and research in modern British studies. Professor Richard Aldous holds the Eugene Meyer Chair.

Photo courtesy Peter Berthoud.

Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, February 24. This event is free and open to the public. The reading begins at 7 p.m. 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.

Beams received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Her newest book, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday 2020), will be released on February 11. Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

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 Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

Valeria Luiselli, the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was honored with the 2020 American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel Lost Children Archive. Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.
http://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/carnegieadult

The Paris Review Foundation has announced the appointment of Mona Simpson as the magazine’s new publisher. Simpson, a Guggenheim Fellow and NEA Award–winning author of six novels, began her involvement with the Paris Review as a work-study student in Columbia’s MFA program. She has served on the staff as a senior editor in the past, and has been a member of the board of directors and the editorial committee since 2014.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/01/22/announcing-our-new-publisher-mona-simpson/

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, was announced to the longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, for his collection Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The award carries a prize of $10,000. 

Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin is among the judges for the PEN Open Book Award. Bard alumnus Pierre Joris ’69 is one of the judges of the Award for Poetry in Translation.
https://pen.org/2020-pen-america-literary-awards-longlists/

Bard’s Maria Sachiko Cecire talks to Slate about children’s fantasy literature, looking at the way 20th-century authors of what she calls the “Oxford School” used the genre “as a means to preserve a sense of magic inside a modern world they saw as increasingly hostile to belief.”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/12/childrens-fantasy-literature-oxford-school-tolkien-lewis.html

Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.
http://tanyamarcuse.com/

Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies Features New Work from Brian Evenson, Joyce Carol Oates, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim

To be mindful of the planet we call home is to be aware that our natural world is suffering. Its oceans are rising up, as if in protest. Its populations of birds and fish, of mammals and reptiles, are, many of them, in steep and steady decline. Forests, coral reefs, habitats of every sort of life form, from tree frogs to butterfly fish, from elephants to bees, are profoundly afflicted. Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers writings that examine and lament the plight of our planet, while also celebrating its grand sublimity, its peerless beauty, and its indispensability. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Earth Elegies features an exclusive interview with Underland author Robert Macfarlane, conducted by Diane Ackerman; a new translation of Sabine Schiffner poems; as well as new work from Brian Evenson, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim.
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. 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/conjunctions73. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

 
http://www.conjunctions.com/

On Monday, November 11, National Book Award–winning author Sigrid Nunez will read from her work at Bard College. The New York Review of Books writes that “Nunez’s keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler,” and, according to the New Yorker, “Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity.” Nunez will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, director of Bard’s Written Arts Program. Presented by Bard Literature Professor Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and Bard’s Written Arts Program, the reading takes place at 6:30 p.m. in the Reem-Kayden Center László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Nunez will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music. For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, call 845-758-7054, email nnyhan@bard.edu, or visit conjunctions.com.

From the languages we speak to politics, philosophy, art, and architecture, the ancient Greeks and Romans have profoundly shaped the history of ideas. By engaging with their legacy, we can develop critical tools for considering our own ideas and beliefs in a fresh light. Studying the ancient past, then, is a vital part of a liberal arts education, as we prepare students to engage critically, imaginatively, and empathetically with the contemporary world around us. To encourage and support students pursuing this important course of study, Bard College has established a new scholarship in Classical Studies. Generous donor support for this scholarship reaffirms that classical studies are more important today than ever. 

The Classical Studies Scholarship recognizes academically outstanding students committed to classical studies. Scholarships cover up to full tuition for four years and are awarded based on need. Scholarship students must maintain a 3.3 grade point average or higher while earning at least 32 credits per year. Recipients are also eligible for a $1,500 stipend for classics-related summer programs (e.g. archaeological excavations, American School at Athens/Rome, language study) following their sophomore or junior year. Transfer students are also eligible for Classical Studies Scholarship funding.

Desirable experiences for selection as a Classical Studies Scholar include a proven interest in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and their legacies; an interest in, and potential for, learning Greek and Latin; strong performance in high school classes related to English and world literature, languages, history, and/or other related humanities subjects. For more information or to apply, go to connect.bard.edu/register/classics_scholar.

“We in the Classical Studies Program are thrilled about this new initiative. These need-based financial aid scholarships, which include support for summer opportunities such as travel abroad and intensive language study, allow Bard College to make a unique contribution to ongoing efforts to widen access and increase equity in the field of Classics. We are excited to welcome the first scholars to Bard in Fall 2020, where they will join our thriving program and work with our award-winning faculty to pursue their passion for the ancient world,” says Associate Professor of Classical Studies Lauren Curtis.

Avallone’s 2019 Bettie Page Halloween Special is “a tribute to Bard,” he writes. The plot unfolds at “Annandale College” in upstate New York, where settings and characters are modeled on Avallone’s memories of Bard.
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/10/22/david-avallones-writers-commentary-on-bettie-pages-halloween-special-2019/

On Monday, October 28, Bard Fiction Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Peter Orner will read from his from his new collection, Maggie Brown & Others, at Bard College. The Washington Post writes: “Peter Orner is that rare find: a young writer who can inhabit any character, traverse any landscape, and yet never stray from the sound of the human heart.” Orner will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, director of Bard’s Written Arts Program. Presented by Bard Literature Professor Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and Bard’s Written Arts Program, the reading takes place at 6:30 p.m. in the Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Peter Orner will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music. For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, call 845-758-7054, email nnyhan@bard.edu, or visit conjunctions.com.
 
http://www.conjunctions.com/about/news/event/?id=136226

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

Bard faculty members Marina van Zuylen and Daniel Terris spoke at "Educating for Freedom, for All," a forum marking the 75th Anniversary of the Teagle Foundation. The event featured leaders and fresh voices promoting equity in higher education. It took place on Thursday, October 3, at the Harold Pratt House in New York City. Daniel Terris, dean of the Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, spoke on the panel "Opening Minds" on the topic of educating for citizenship. Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard College and national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, spoke on the panel "Liberal Arts for All" on how the humanities bring hope to adults in crisis.

Author Clare Beams has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Beams will give a public reading at Bard in spring 2020.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

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 Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).
https://www.bard.edu/bfp/