News from the Division of Languages and Literature

In the second in a regular series of conversations hosted by Bard professor Neil Gaiman, author and artist Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) discusses time travel, Doctor Who, graveyards, taxidermy, graphic novels, pictures, books, and long-distance romance. The program takes place on Friday, October 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater.

Bard MFA photography faculty Mark Alice Durant interviews MFA writing faculty David Levi Strauss on art, writing, and politics.

Karen Russell, the 2011 Bard Fiction Prize winner, talks with Bard literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow about his new book, The Forgers.

On Monday, September 15, Joseph O'Neill, Bard’s Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts and the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Netherland, will read from his new novel, The Dog. Publishers Weekly describes The Dog as “Pitch-perfect prose . . . Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society.”

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.

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.”

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.