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The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking’s (IWT) upcoming April Conference, "Crafting, Composing, Conversing: The Writer’s Voice Reconsidered," will focus on the teaching practices that help students to develop their writerly voices. This conference will welcome educators of all disciplines to Bard College's Annandale campus on Friday, April 28, 2023, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Speaker Peter Elbow, the author of the bestselling books Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, will deliver the keynote address. The conference offers an online attendance option for those who are unable to join in person at Annandale. Standard Tuition is $575, Early-Bird Tuition is $500, and Early-Bird Group Tuition is $450. Register by March 28 to qualify for discounted rates. A group is three or more teachers from the same institution. Scholarship applications are available. To learn more and register, go to: iwt.bard.edu. 

The 2023 April conference focuses on IWT writing-based teaching practices rooted in the interplay of written and spoken voices to explore voice as concept, craft, and conversation. Voice, according to Peter Elbow, has become a “warm fuzzy word” that people use to describe writing they like or that does something appealing they can’t quite pinpoint. “We’re in trouble if we don’t know what we mean by the term,” he adds.  

In small workshop groups, participants will work toward a clear, nuanced, and practical understanding of voice. Our work will also consider challenges and dilemmas: how can hesitant writers or students writing in a second language tap into voice? Can a strong voice get in the way of an essay’s substance or argument? How do we honor and create space for our students’ diverse voices, both spoken and written? Working together, we will aim to identify clear and transparent language that can help our students recognize, develop, and experiment with voice in their writing. 

About Keynote Speaker Peter Elbow
Peter Elbow is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been extremely influential in the field of Composition Studies, having authored Writing with Power and other books that have transformed how writing is taught. He also played an instrumental role in the founding of Bard IWT, and the institute is honored to welcome him back. 

Elbow has been a Director of Writing Programs for over ten years, first at Stony Brook University and then at UMass Amherst. He was on the founding faculty at two experimental colleges, Franconia College in New Hampshire and Evergreen State College in Washington State—precursors to today's movements towards interdisciplinary teaching. 

Nuruddin Farah, distinguished professor of literature at Bard College, was interviewed in the Financial Times, where he spoke about his ambiguous relationship with his homeland as a Somali novelist who has lived in exile, his identity as a radical secularist, and his refusal to tolerate intolerance. “Like many people forced to live in exile, Farah has a complex relationship with his homeland,” writes David Pilling for the Financial Times. “A liberal who abhors the radical Islam that has overwhelmed his country, a fierce individualist who detests the conformity imposed by many families, Farah is a man who has lived in 13 countries but who can only think about one: Somalia.” Farah, who has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and whose works have been translated into more than 20 languages, spoke of the transformative power of books to take on a direction and life of their own in the literary sphere. “The books are continuing their dialogue through the writing with other books,” he said. “And the reader is the person who finds out which books they’re in dialogue with.”
https://www.ft.com/content/36413a25-8df5-46f6-85be-4e9c00793f1a

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, has been awarded with the rank of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak on behalf of France. “It gives me great pleasure to hereby highlight your dedication in the service of culture, which holds such a special place in French people’s hearts,” wrote Malak. One of the primary distinctions from the four ministerial orders of the French Republic, this award is bestowed upon those who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the cultural spheres, or by their support for the distribution of knowledge and works that form the wealth of French cultural heritage. 
  
Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia (MA) and Princeton (PhD). Aside from The Lost, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, Mendelsohn’s books include: An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus; The Elusive Embrace (1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; three collections of essays; a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays (2002), and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems.” His tenth and most recent book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, was published in September 2020, and he has just completed a translation of Homer’s Odyssey, to be published by University of Chicago Press in 2024.

The Order of Arts and Letters (L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) was established in 1957 by the French Minister of Culture to reward individuals who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the arts or literature or by the contribution they have made to the influence of arts and letters in France and worldwide. It consists of three ranks: Knight (Chevalier), Officer (Officier), and the highest honor, Commander (Commandeur). 

One of the most stunning aspects of writer and editor Richard Gottlieb’s career is the enormous number of books he has edited on a wide spectrum of subjects, writes James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, for Current. The sheer range in content that Gottlieb has edited—in some six or seven hundred books—speaks to a rare freedom that few book reviewers are allowed. “Most of us have a ‘beat,’ a subject with which we’re deeply familiar and on which we may have published books of our own,” Romm writes. “We’re called upon by an editor who has us on his or her list of those who can cover that beat.” In his view, this practice leaves little room for reviewers to explore new interests and evaluate works outside of the subjects they are traditionally assigned, resulting in the literary world largely lacking the perspectives of offbeat enthusiasts. “Rather than maintain lists of experts who cover specific beats,” he writes, “Perhaps we’d be better served if editors kept lists of writers who, like Gottlieb, can be interested in anything.”
https://currentpub.com/2023/02/20/forum-bring-on-the-bazaar/

Assistant Professor of Written Arts and National Book Award finalist Jenny Xie has been selected as a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in literature. Xie received one of 54 fellowships awarded to early-career artists based in Minnesota and New York City. Eight fellows each were selected in the fields of dance; film, video and digital production; literature; music; theater, performance and spoken word; and visual arts, and three in each of the newly added fields of technology centered arts and combined artistic fields. Xie will receive $50,000 over two years ($25,000 per year) in direct support to create new work, advance artistic goals, and/or promote professional development.

Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an assistant professor of written arts at Bard College.

“I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity,” she writes.

Field-specific panels, composed of artists, curators, artistic leaders and arts administrators, reviewed a total of 702 applicants before identifying 129 as finalists for fuller discussion in advance of recommending a slate of fellows to the Jerome Board of Directors for approval. In their deliberations, panels considered applicants’ past works, artistic accomplishments, the potential impact of a fellowship on their careers and their artistic field, and their alignment with Jerome’s values of diversity, innovation and risk, and humility. This year’s cohort exemplifies Jerome Foundation’s commitment to diversity and the diversity of artists across all fields with 82% of the fellows identifying as Black, Native American, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or Arab American or as multi-racial or multi-ethnic.

Fellows are also offered one-on-one coaching and peer gathering opportunities through the MAP Fund’s Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) program, designed to help artists individually and collectively consider, invent and co-devise solutions tailored to their specific practice and aesthetic ambitions.