News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Why read? Joseph Luzzi, professor of comparative literature at Bard, talks about the importance of the written word in an era of mass media and mobile technology.

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning Mexican author Valeria Luiselli as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Luiselli, who joins the faculty this spring as a research associate, will begin teaching courses at Bard in the fall 2019 semester.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and currently lives in New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos (Sidewalks), and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos (Faces in the Crowd), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she was named one of the 5 under 35 by the National Book Foundation, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015.

Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker, among others. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her new novel, Lost Children Archive, which was written in English, will be published by Knopf in February 2019.
 

Thomas Wild of Bard College and Barbara Hahn of Vanderbilt University, editors of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works, Critical Edition, discuss the series. (In German)

Mengestu, chair of the Bard Written Arts Program, was asked to select his favorite work by a black female American. His choice: Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Bard IWT associate director Bland “turns her unflinching gaze upon the place of her childhood and adolescence, a native Cherokee homeland on the forested western edge of North Carolina.”

Bard professor Ann Lauterbach announced the new home of Professor Emeritus John Ashbery’s complete personal library at a poetry reading at Harvard earlier this month.

“In more than thirty-five collections of poetry, Kelly has utterly failed at one thing: to pigeonhole himself into predictability” (Booklist).

Townsend talks about the intriguing challenge of writing poems for a character, not as herself, in the new film The Kindergarten Teacher.

Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity features new work from Laura van den Berg, Ann Beattie, Brandon Hobson, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Scott, Can Xue, and more.

From the Bible to The Invisible Man, Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi offered a “soul-saving” One Day University lecture in Woodstock.

Professor Mendelsohn describes how he has experienced the Odyssey at different times in his life, and how he rediscovers the text with each new translation.

Bard alum Julie Fogliano’s A House That Once Was, published by Roaring Brook Press, is among 10 winners of the 2018 award.

“Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today” will be held at BHSEC Manhattan on October 31, followed by a lunch hour talk at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library on November 1.

Author Greg Jackson has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his debut short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016). Jackson’s lyrical and unflinching stories map the degradations of contemporary life with insight and grace. His residency at Bard College is for the Spring 2019 semester, during which time Jackson will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The eight stories collected in Greg Jackson’s Prodigals take the reader all over the earth and across time, from a drug-addled weekend in Palm Springs to the remote provincial compound of a reclusive French tennis champion; a man drives into a hurricane with his psychiatrist, and a woman recounts a story about a summer spent painting dorm rooms in the summer of 1984 with a deranged coworker while Foucault dies and violent news from Central America hisses in the background. These stories concern troubled and deeply human characters trapped in mirrored mazes of playfully structured narrative, written in electric and often hilarious sentences. Prodigals is a book that delights, disturbs, and surprises around every corner, with the hand of a masterful author always twisting the kaleidoscope to transform dazzling patterns of light, shape, and color before our eyes.”

“What a privilege and a thrill it is to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and join such an illustrious ensemble of past winners. For the support and vote of encouragement, I am deeply grateful to this year’s prize committee. The chance to make Bard my home through the spring, to join its community and get to know its remarkable student body, is an incredible gift, and I look forward to the friendships and conversations I hope will develop over the course of my residency, as the days lengthen and spring descends on this sanctuary in the Hudson Valley,” says Jackson.

Greg Jackson’s fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center and MacDowell Colony. A finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, he was chosen by Granta in 2017 for their decennial list of Best Young American Novelists. In 2016 he received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for Prodigals, a book the New York Times called “so bold and perceptive that it delivers a contact high.” He is currently at work on a novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, due out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that looks at the future of reporting, technology, and truth. Before turning to fiction, Jackson worked as an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C.

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 Carmen Maria Machado for her short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017).
 

His choice? Arthur Danto’s What Art Is: “Danto reminds us that art and the critical consideration of the aesthetic ought not remain the poor stepchildren of the academy.”

The Times asks 13 authors to recommend the most frightening books they’ve ever read.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander and Painter Amy Sherald in Conversation

Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today with Elizabeth Alexander and Amy Sherald 
Bard High School Early College Manhattan, October 31 at 6:30 p.m.

Lunch Hour Talk with Amy Sherald and Thelma Golden
Bard at Brooklyn Public Library, November 1 at 12:45 p.m.

Watch Live Starting at 6:30 Eastern Time on October 31:



Bard High School Early College Manhattan (BHSEC) hosts a discussion with poet Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald about their creative processes and their commitments to the humanities. This public conversation seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place on Wednesday, October 31, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at BHSEC on 525 East Houston Street in New York City. Preregistration is required. Register here. A live webcast of the event will also be available.

Poet and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald have both produced works critical to marking and reflecting on recent periods of political and social change in the United States. Alexander wrote and recited the poem “Praise Song for Our Day” to usher forward the presidency of the first black American president, Barack Obama, and Sherald painted the official portrait of the first lady, Michelle Obama, one of two works to mark the end of the Obama Presidency. Moderators BHSEC literature professor Brittney Edmonds and Bard Associate Professor of History Christian Crouch will ask Alexander and Sherald four contextualizing questions around the process of patronage and collecting in the arts, artistic practice and black feminism, how their work speaks across artistic media, and how their work engages with the image of body.

“This event, the first of a series, is inspired by an ongoing dialogue within Bard’s Africana Studies Program surrounding race and diversity and social engagement in the visual and performative arts. We hope to create the opportunity for public dialogue around creative artistic practice and the humanities, and how artists engage their audience and broader community,” says Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson.

This event is cosponsored by Humanities New York, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Undergraduate Program in Africana Studies, Bard High School Early College, and Bard American Studies Program.

On Thursday, November 1, from 12:45pm to 2:00pm, Amy Sherald will be in conversation with curator Thelma Golden at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), the first New York City Microcollege. In this inaugural Bard at BPL Lunch Hour Talk, Golden and Sherald discuss an understated aspect of the creative process: the relationship between curator and artist. Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has presided over exhibitions in which painter Amy Sherald’s works were included and was involved in the selection of Sherald to paint the portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place at BPL Central Library, Dweck Center, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. Preregistration is required. Register here.
 

Seth Greenland’s novel is “the tragicomic odyssey of a virtuous man with a chink in his armor that proves his unlikely undoing,” writes Akst.

Daniel Mason’s new novel, The Winter Soldier, “is his first about a doctor and, in part, a coming-of-age story about what that profession can demand and return.”

“This fine book,” Aldous writes, “while not as obviously thrilling as Tony Judt’s earlier Postwar (2005), has a number of interesting things to say.”

The New Academy, founded after the 2018 Swedish Academy prize was cancelled in the aftermath of a sexual assault scandal, names Gaiman to its shortlist of four.

Morley, whose “Brent, Bandit King” is narrated by a computer program known as the Facilitator, talks about AI, the gaming world, and his story’s path to publication.

“The literary world should make greater efforts to reach teenagers, and more high schools should promote contemporary literature by living authors.”

“Machines take advantage of the particularity of each person’s appearance to flatten out our collective individuality,” writes Cole.

Bard College has received two grants from the NEH in support of faculty-led humanities projects, part of the endowment’s third and last round of funding for fiscal year 2018.

Binet’s new novel is a police procedural featuring the most influential figures of postmodern critical theory.

First, writes Fiori, we have to recognize the latent marginalization of minority populations in the mainstream media.

Assistant Professor of Literature Peter L’Official on how Arthur Jafa manipulates time to illuminate black experience in the video collage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.

The New Academy Prize in Literature—which is open to public voting—provides an alternative to this year’s canceled Nobel Prize in Literature, and Neil Gaiman is among the nominees.

Grayson Morley is a Bard College written arts graduate from the Class of 2013. Grayson is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  

"I'm working on an absurdist novel about UPS efficiency tracking, part of which will comprise my thesis when I graduate," he explains. "I teach both creative writing and English courses as part of my funding package."

After graduating from Bard, Grayson had a six-month fellowship focusing on farm worker labor rights in western New York. He then returned to Bard to work with the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs for two years. "If your plan is to go to grad school, take some time off first," he says. "No, seriously. I received this advice from mentors, and while I was loathe to take it ('How many cover letters do I have to write?'), the years I spent working provided experiences that enriched my current course of education."

"My Bard education proved to me the value of inquisitiveness and unwavering idealism," Grayson observes. "Mentors like Mary Caponegro and Matthew Mutter not only shaped my time in Annandale, but have remained treasured resources, and friends, into my life beyond Bard. My involvement with the Bard Prison Initiative remains a formative experience in my trajectory as an educator and person. I am deeply proud of my association with it, and with Bard as a whole."

What did he like best about Bard? "You never met a boring person. There were no carbon copies: everyone was so sincerely into their own, particular thing. My friends jokingly called it the Island of Misfit Toys, but since graduating, I've come to greatly miss that eclectic community."

"Things will be messy at first," Grayson says of life after graduation. "Possibly disheartening. But embrace what comes—then work like hell to find your ideal."

With 68.5 million people forced from their homes in 2017, Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman explains why every one of them needs our help.

“My class at Bard College is like a book group that I don't have to be democratic about. It's great to be able to talk to people about books that you love.” 

Professor O’Neill talks about his new story collection Good Trouble and writing in the age of Trump.

This new volume “offers an English reader a personal tour through the private quarters of Tchaikovsky to his most informal and intimate zone.”

“The great thing about Norse mythology is that right at the end it gives you hope, just when you think you’re done.”

Professor of comparative literature Joseph Luzzi reviews new translations of works by the contemporary Italian novelists Domenico Starnone, Paolo Cognetti, and Edgardo Franzosini.

Conjunctions:70, Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue features new work from Diane Ackerman, Mary Jo Bang, Julia Elliott, Nam Le, Peter Orner, Donald Revell, and others.

Seniors Elena LeFevre, Nicola Koepnick, Adelina Colaku, Page Benoit, and Madeleine Breshears, and Bethany Zulick ’16 are among the Fulbright winners for 2018–19.

Professor Baldasso, director of Bard’s Italian Studies Program, was awarded the fellowship for his work on literary dissent during the transition from Fascism to democracy in Italy.

Farrow was recognized for a series of articles that contributed to a “worldwide reckoning” regarding sexual harassment and assault and the dynamics of gender and power.

“If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big” (Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books). 

Neil Gaiman’s ghoulish children’s novella Coraline is being adapted by the Royal Opera in London.

On Monday, April 2, novelist and short story writer Laura van den Berg, winner of the 2015 Bard Fiction Prize, will read from her work at Bard College.

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music will present the Harmony and Power conference and concert series on March 30–31 on the Bard College campus.

Long Soldier received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry collection Whereas, “a brilliantly innovative text that examines history, landscapes, and identities.”

Russian novelist, essayist, and short story writer Tatyana Tolstaya will read from her new collection Aetherial Worlds.

On Thursday, March 29, prominent Russian novelist, essayist, short story writer, and public intellectual Tatyana Tolstaya will speak at Bard College about her new book, Aetherial Worlds, a collection of 18 stories.

“One of the finest, most dimensional inquiries into the significance of books and the role of reading in human life comes from Neil Gaiman.”

Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, written 20 years ago and now adapted for the screen as Submission, complicates the current cultural conversation about sexual harassment.

On Monday, March 5, Daniel Mendelsohn will give a book reading and signing followed by a wine reception for his new book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.