News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Writer in Residence Edie Meidav interviews literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow

Literature professor Bradford Morrow's book of "morally complex tales," The Uninnocent, makes New York Times Editors' Choice list!

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose has been on the Bard faculty since 2005. The recipient of many awards, Prose has published more than 20 books, including the novel Blue Angel (2000), a National Book Award nominee.

Other fiction includes the novels A Changed Man (2005), Hunters and Gatherers (1995), Primitive People (1992), and Bigfoot Dreams (1986), as well as the story collection Guided Tours of Hell (1997). Along with Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009) and Caravaggio (2005), Prose’s nonfiction includes the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer (2006), Sicilian Odyssey (2003), and Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003). Her stories and essays have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, the New Yorker, and the New York Times among many others. She is a contributing editor at Harper’s, a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and a former president of PEN American Center. She is a recipient of the Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature; the Washington University International Humanities Medal; Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships; and many other grants and awards. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College.

Acclaimed Romanian émigré writer Norman Manea is the Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture and writer in residence at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 1989 and is the author of 22 volumes of fiction and essays.

Among numerous honors, he has received the United States MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, The National Jewish Book Award and the Literary Lion Medal by the State Library of New York, has been awarded Italy’s International Nonino Prize for Literature, and been elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Art. His memoir The Hooligan’s Return received France’s Prix Médicis Étranger in 2006. In 2007, he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of Romania and in 2008 received honorary degrees in literature from the University of Bucharest and Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. In 2009, the French Ministry of Culture conferred the most prestigious title of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres on him. His work has been translated into 20 languages. He lives with his wife in New York City.

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe supports fuel-subsidy protests and says that Nigeria's unrest can be eased by better, less-corrupt leaders.

Mary Caponegro is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard, and has been on the faculty since 2002. She was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Italy, graduating in 1978 from Bard College and going on to receive her master’s degree from Brown University.

Author Jonathan Safran Foer has called her “one of the most imaginative, daring, serious and playful writers alive.” She is the author of five short story collections: Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. She is a contributor to Review of Contemporary Fiction, Epoch, Conjunctions, Sulfur, Gargoyle, and Iowa Review, and a contributing editor for Conjunctions and Tyuonyi. Caponegro has received the General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bruno Arcudi Award, Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, Teacher of the Year Award from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Undergraduate Teaching Award from Syracuse University, and the Lannan Residency Fellowship.

Bard literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow on his new book, imagination, entropy, and the dark side of human nature.

Bradford Morrow has been on the Bard College faculty since 1990. He is a professor of literature, as well as a Bard Center fellow and the founding editor of Conjunctions, the distinguished literary magazine published by Bard.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Professor Morrow grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has lived or worked in a variety of places, including rural Honduras, Paris, and Cuneo, Italy. He received his B.A. from the University of Colorado and did his graduate studies as a Danforth Fellow at Yale University. Morrow is the author of six novels, including Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift, Ariel's Crossing, and The Diviner's Tale, as well as an illustrated children's book, Didn't Didn't Do It, with Gahan Wilson, and several poetry collections. He has edited numerous books, including, with Sam Hamill, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. He is coeditor of The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, and author of the short story collection The Uninnocent and the novella The Fall of the Birds. He is completing work on his seventh novel, The Prague Sonata, as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, Meditations on a Shadow. Professor Morrow is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction (2007), PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in literary journal editing (2007); O. Henry Prize (2003); and the Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998). He was a member of the board of trustees of the PEN American Center from 1998 to 2002.

Ann Lauterbach has been, since 1990, cochair of writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and, since 1997, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Lauterbach has published eight collections of poetry: Many Times, But Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), And for Example (1994), On a Stair (1997), If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (2001), Hum (2005), and Or to Begin Again (2009). She has also published several chapbooks and collaborations with visual artists, including How Things Bear Their Telling with Lucio Pozzi and A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories, a Song, a Moonlit Cove with Ellen Phelan for the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum, New York. She has written on art and poetics in relation to cultural value, notably in a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the poetics of experience (Penguin 2005, 2008). She collaborated with artist Ann Hamilton for the “Whitecloth” catalogue at the Aldrich Museum, and wrote the introductory essay to Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” drawings for The Nancy Book, published by Siglio Press (2008). Lauterbach’s essay “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education for Now” is included in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Madoff (MIT Press 2009). She is a Visiting Core Critic (Sculpture) at Yale. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York State Foundation for the Arts, Ingram Merrill, and The John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation.