News from the Division of Languages and Literature

On Monday, September 22, author Lindsay Hill ’75, will read from his novel, Sea of Hooks, winner of the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award, finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and named one of the top 10 books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and New York magazine. Kirkus Reviews calls Sea of Hooks “a remarkable and multifaceted novel—philosophical, poignant and puzzling,” while Publisher’s Weekly writes that “nearly every paragraph astonishes, every moment rich with magic and daring.”

Bard alumnus Lindsay Hill's first novel, Sea of Hooks, has won the PEN Center's top prize for fiction. Hill will give a reading of his work at Bard on September 22.

Writer in Residence Mona Simpson is a former senior editor at the Paris Review and the author of five novels.

She was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia's M.F.A. program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at the Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here (1986). After that, she wrote The Lost Father (1992), A Regular Guy (1997), and Off Keck Road (2000). Simpson has been awarded a Whiting Prize (1986), a Guggenheim (1988), a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University (1987), a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Prize (1995), and a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize (2001). She is a Pen Faulkner finalist (2001) and most recently received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008). She worked 10 years on My Hollywood (2010). "It’s the book that took me too long because it meant so much to me," she says. Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartleby the dog.

"My job is to imagine. I am a novelist," says Joseph O'Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts, in this interview about his new book, set in Dubai.

How do some literary works retain broad appeal for centuries after they are written, while others—recognized by scholars and critics as brilliant—largely fade away?

Teju Cole visits Leukerbad, Switzerland, the site of James Baldwin's essay, and examines racism by retracing Baldwin's footsteps and his writing.

Language and Thinking faculty member Miranda Mellis considers what she learned from the various jobs she held beginning in her childhood, and how that contributed to her writing.

Joseph O'Neill's The Dog and Bradford Morrow's The Forgers are listed among Publisher's Weekly's most anticipated books of the season.

"There is no poetry without a politics," says Bard alumnus Andrew Durbin '12 in this interview about poetry, surveillance, and the Internet.

Bard faculty member and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow's new novel The Forgers has been listed among Publisher's Weekly's most anticipated books of the fall.

Bard writer in residence Francine Prose reviews Andrea Canobbio’s "remarkable" novel of an intense and ill-fated love affair between two doctors.

The Bard Center for Civic Engagement announces more than 50 winners for the 2014 Community Action Award program, which supports student efforts to engage with communities locally, nationally, and internationally by providing funding for participation in internships that address issues impacting people around the world.

"The life of the first emperor is an ideal vehicle for a historical novel," writes Professor Mendelsohn. "Augustus is a figure about whom we know at once a great deal and very little ..."

Professor Mendelsohn considers how writers have responded to national trauma, from ancient to modern times.

Bard writer in residence Teju Cole asked his 160,000 Twitter followers to tweet photos of their TVs during the World Cup. The result was an art project offering a synchronized global view of the games.

When searching for literary taboos, Prose turns to writers who have been imprisoned or mistreated by their governments because of their work.

Writer in residence Francine Prose talks about labels .... and teaching a class at Bard called Strange Books.

Chronogram interviews Bard College professor of Italian Joseph Luzzi about his memoir My Two Italies, which illuminates the cultural differences between northern and southern Italy through the lens of Luzzi's family life.

An unpublished novel, a record deal, and crumble for dinner ... Hayley Campbell, author of The Art of Neil Gaiman, reveals fun facts about legendary writer and Bard faculty member Neil Gaiman.

Four covers from Bard's La Voz magazine will be displayed in the exhibition “Vive La Guelaguetza: An Encounter with Oaxaca” at the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, through July 19. The exhibition commemorates La Guelaguetza, a world-famous cultural festival from Oaxaca, Mexico, which for the last five years has been celebrated locally at Waryas Park in Poughkeepsie. The festival, which attracts thousands of spectators, will take place on August 3 this year. The La Voz covers on display feature the town's past La Guelaguetza celebrations, and are on view alongside paintings, photography, and traditional costumes from the state of Oaxaca. Bard College students Mariel Fiori '05 and Emily Schmall '05 founded La Voz in 2004 as a Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) project, aiming to serve the Latino community of the Hudson Valley with a free Spanish-language magazine. Fiori is still editor at La Voz, and the award-winning publication now has an estimated 20,000 readers in the area. La Voz will mark its 10th anniversary with a celebratory evening at the Spiegeltent at Bard's Fisher Center on August 12.

Experimental Humanities Director Maria Cecire talks about how the new concentration draws on innovative methods to help students explore the human condition in the digital age.

Francine Prose reviews Agnieszka Holland's new film, in which one young man's shocking protest against Soviet occupation in January 1969 inspires family and strangers to take action at great cost.

The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded annually to a promising, emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger. Winners receive a monetary award and an appointment as writer in residence at Bard for one semester. Applications for the 2015 prize are due by July 15, 2014.

Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Fermor's The Broken Road, the long-anticipated, posthumously published final volume in the trilogy chronicling his famous walk across Europe in the 1930s.

Writers, says Mona Simpson, don't usually get rich doing their craft. And yet, they spend their lives "making something that you find beautiful and that's deeply satisfying and fulfilling ... that's a kind of wealth."

Bard alumni Joel Clark '05, Tavit Geudelekian '05, Andrew Kopas '08, and Mark Perloff '08 are part of King Post Studios, which last year launched a board game based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and is now working on a new game for the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.

Human Rights and Written Arts joint major Corinna grew up in the small town of Sherman, Texas. She has been active with Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement and the TLS (Trustee Leader Scholar) program, which supports student volunteer efforts. In this interview, she talks about falling in love with Bard's campus, getting involved in the community, and how Bard has changed her.

Bard writing professor Susan Fox Rogers took her kayak out on North Tivoli Bay last week not expecting to see much wildlife, since the height of migration has passed. To her surprise, the trip was marked by a series of encounters, including one with a baby beaver.

"The only people worth envying are the dead. That much, at any rate, is clear once you’ve spent some time reading the Greeks," begins Daniel Mendelsohn in this "Bookends" piece, which honors a most enviable ancient writer.

Professor Gaiman visits two refugee camps in Jordan run by the UN Refugee Agency and listens to the stories of Syrians who have fled violence in their home country.

Bard alumnus Chris Claremont '72 revitalized the X-Men comic book series, creating some of its most iconic characters ... with a little help from studying political theory at Bard.

From Africa to China, Pakistan to the Philippines, to locales that are not to be found on any map, Conjunctions:62, Exile—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—examines exile as both a literal expulsion or ostracism and, as Primo Levi has it, “the prevalence of the unreal over the real.” The issue features Richard Sieburth’s first English translation of a hilarious, vitriolic work by Charles Baudelaire, written while self-exiled to Belgium; a cover photograph of an installation by Chiharu Shiota; and new writing from Laura van den Berg, Paul West, Brian Evenson, Peter Straub, H. G. Carrillo, Marjorie Welish, Maxine Chernoff, Aleš Šteger, Edie Meidav, Can Xue, and Arthur Sze.

“Are you boasting or complaining?” Francine Prose considers a recent essay by writer Lionel Shriver, in which Shriver described feeling nostalgic for the time before her commercial success.

Professor Mendelsohn writes that the skills required of an excellent critic are often impediments to writing strong fiction.

Author Mona Simpson discusses Chekhov's "Three Years," an unusual love story that plays on romantic conventions to reveal the growing affection of a couple over years of marriage.

By leaves or play of sunlight, John Cage: Artist and Naturalist at the Horticultural Society of New York is presented with the John Cage Trust at Bard College, and features the composer's poetry and scores with lithographs.

Until recently Bard alumnus Dan Cline was teaching English language classes to young people in Haisyn, Ukraine, working on community projects, and even ending up in the local press for his efforts. That changed over the winter as political unrest in the country grew into a revolution and the Peace Corps evacuated all its volunteers from the country.

Bard College announces the appointment of esteemed writer Anne Carson as Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence. Carson, who joins the faculty in fall 2014, will teach courses in classical studies and in written arts through the Division of Languages and Literature. Anne Carson, a classics scholar, poet, essayist, critic, and translator, has won international acclaim across genres. She was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; was honored with the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry; and was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow in 2000.

Until recently Bard alumnus Dan Cline ‘08 was teaching English language classes to young people in Haisyn, Ukraine, working on community projects, and even ending up in the local press for his efforts. That changed over the winter as political unrest in the country grew into a revolution. In late February, the Peace Corps deemed Ukraine unsafe and evacuated more than 200 volunteers from the country. Now Cline has gone home to New Jersey, hoping to eventually return to Ukraine to finish his service. In the meantime, he’s giving presentations at local schools and doing what he can to support his Ukrainian colleagues remotely.

The revolution seemed far away to Cline when he was in Haisyn. The small city in central Ukraine is 175 miles from the capital, Kiev, the site of much of the nation’s turmoil. There were no protests in Haisyn, only polite discussion in the teachers’ lounge at the school where he worked. While his site was quiet and safe, that wasn’t necessarily the case for his fellow Peace Corps volunteers in other parts of the country. “I very much want to go back and continue my work,” Cline says, “but I understand how and why the decision was made to evacuate.”

Bard College alumnus Dan Cline '08

Cline had been teaching English to students in the equivalent of the fourth through eleventh grades at The Haisyn School–Gymnasium Complex. His major at Bard was an interdivisional combination of literature, history, and Russian/Eurasian studies, which prepared him perfectly for his Peace Corps service. “I enjoy teaching English,” he says. “That has to do with my love of the language, which is thanks in no small part to the wonderful English department at Bard College.”

One of the Peace Corps’s goals in the region is to bring new and interactive teaching methods into the classroom. “There’s a large focus on memorization,” he says, “so we try to get away from the textbook as much as possible with role-playing activities and visual aids.” All the classes are taught in teams with one Ukrainian instructor and one Peace Corps volunteer. Cline praises his colleagues as experienced teachers who are open to new ideas. The classroom resources are another matter: Many of the students don’t have dictionaries, and the teachers’ desk editions are worn and out of date. Dan has been raising money through family and friends to better equip the classes.

Cline poses in his classroom in Haisyn with his students and fellow teacher.

In addition to teaching, Cline’s Peace Corps service requires a capstone project—a community service initiative to be left in the hands of local staff upon his departure. Cline’s project, for which he received a USAID grant, is an outdoor athletic complex at the school where he teaches. Plans include a playground, workout equipment, and stone chess tables. Programming would be offered at the school and around the complex to promote healthy lifestyles for people of all ages. A Young Volunteers Club—a national, state-supported phenomenon in Ukraine—would be responsible for raising additional funds to build the structure, as well as maintaining the programming series in the long term. He was in the midst of executing this project when he was recalled to the United States, and his carefully crafted plans for the site are now on hold.

Cline wrapped up other projects as well as he could, hoping to return but planning for the worst. He had intended to direct two camps for children this summer, one for HIV-positive youth and another that teaches boys about gender and discrimination. Since being evacuated, he has been training new Ukrainian camp staff via Skype so they can take over from the Peace Corps volunteers. He was also preparing exams for Ukraine’s National Olympiad, an advanced English language competition for high school students. He and a colleague were able to finish writing the exams after returning to the United States and to send them back to the country’s Ministry of Education in time for the event in March.

Cline speaks Russian and Ukrainian, and has a strong background in the region’s history and culture. “When I came to Bard, Visiting Professor Jonathan Brent had offered Soviet History, which I jumped on. I was completely enthralled with the subject. It was just amazing the professors that I met. Professor Gennady Shkliarevsky and Professor Jennifer Day worked with me a lot, and they were true mentors.” Seeing Professor Day’s level of language proficiency as a non-native speaker inspired Cline. He decided to study Russian, and enrolled in Bard’s study abroad program at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, beginning with a summer language intensive and returning for further study the following year.

Cline hosted a Thanksgiving celebration for his students in 2013.

“I had a wonderful time traveling and learning. My Russian improved by leaps and bounds, and that made it vastly easier to pick up Ukrainian later. I had an unfair advantage. As a lot of my Peace Corps friends like to tell me, ‘Showing up speaking Russian is not really fair for the rest of us.’ I definitely have Bard to thank for putting me in a place in which my language skills were so advanced that I feel comfortable giving speeches.” That is what Cline did last fall at Rayon Rada, the parliamentary body in Haisyn that administers the surrounding county. He attended a ceremony with his director during which he was asked to make an impromptu speech. He was later interviewed by one of the mayor’s assistants and that interview was broadcast over the radio in Haisyn.

Now back home, the safety of his friends, coworkers, and students in Haisyn is always on his mind. He’s looking for a job in the United States, but he continues his service by educating Americans about Ukrainian history and culture. In March, Dan spoke at New Jersey City University and to several classes at the Hudson School in Hoboken, his former school. He also hopes to present at his high school and at Bard.

In mid-April, the Peace Corps officially ended the terms of service for all volunteers who had been in Ukraine, though there is a possibility that Cline could be reinstated at the same location within a year. He finds it difficult to imagine not returning to Haisyn. “I hope that I can resume my service. It was wonderful to be in Ukraine. I met amazing volunteers who were full of energy and ideas, and I met so many fantastic Ukrainians. I also learned a lot about my own abilities. A lot of firsts happened in Ukraine.”

On April 4, Bard College Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman took the stage at the Fisher Center for a historic conversation about cartooning and writing, working across artistic mediums, friendship, identity, and more.

What responsibilities do writers have to their spouses, friends, and children as they draw from personal experience to create works of art? Francine Prose looks at the ethics and repercussions of using real relationships for literary material.

The Nation (Pakistan) praises Bard College Berlin undergraduate Osman Ali Chaudhry's first book, Wisdom Salad, as "a short but sweet and thought-provoking anthology."

When comics legends Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman shared the stage at the Fisher Center earlier this month, their discussion ranged across art forms and into history both personal and global.

The Bard Free Press, the college's student newspaper, has won two New York Press Association awards in the 2013 Better Newspaper Contest. Among college newspapers, the Free Press received first place for design and second place for feature story. The judges awarding the design prize said of the publication, "Brilliant design and layout. It felt like reading art. ... Not traditional by any means but that is what makes it so remarkable. It is a format that a young person could pick up and engage/relate with, and that demographic is obviously highly important in the future landscape of print publications."

Bard writer in residence Francine Prose's Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is "a bona fide page turner."

Norman Manea survived a Nazi concentration camp in Ukraine and a communist dictatorship in his native Romania. Through his experiences, he learned a language of subversion that sets apart his impressive body of work. (Daily Beast)

On Thursday, April 10, the Written Arts Program at Bard College presents a reading by Rikki Ducornet (Bard ’64). A poet, fiction writer, and visual artist, Ducornet’s many books include the recent novels Netsuke, Gazelle, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition, and Phosphor in Dreamland. Publisher’s Weekly said of her story collection The Complete Butcher’s Tales: “[It’s] told in prose of such beauty that one can't help silently mouthing the words. Fluid, studied, almost overripe, it is also intensely visual.”

On Monday, April 7, Michael Cunningham—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours, By Nightfall, Flesh and Blood, and other books—will read from his work at Bard College. Cunningham will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 4:00 p.m. in Olin Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

Live Arts Bard (LAB) is a partnership between the Theater and Performance Program and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. As its acronym suggests, Live Arts Bard is a laboratory for new performance. Each year LAB will provide residencies for individual artists, or groups of collaborators, in theater, performance, dance, live arts, and allied art forms. Its aim is to develop a fertile and nurturing community of visiting artists and students, who work side by side to generate projects and new creative methodologies.