News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Polling shows the British people and Americans are coalescing around the idea that Brexit and Trump were, respectively, mistakes for each country. When it comes to long-lasting impact, however, in Ian Buruma’s view, it’s no contest which is worse. “While Brexit and the election of Trump caused severe shocks to both Britain and the US, it looks like the damage of Brexit will be worse and last longer,” writes Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, for Bloomberg. Poor leadership is, in the long run, easier to recover from than a disastrous referendum, he writes, as the latter “cannot be easily undone.” For the United States, “as long as [Trump] does not return for another term in 2024, much of the damage he did can probably be undone.” With Brexit, no matter the change in leadership, “most people in Britain will be worse off and the country will continue to lag behind its neighbors for the foreseeable future.”

Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 452 U.S. colleges and represent 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 81 countries through October 2023.
 
Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
 
Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
 
Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
 
Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
 
Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
 
Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 
 
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
 
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
 
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

For Architectural Record, Bard Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program Peter L’Official interviews architect and writer Sejou Cooke, who is the curator of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, an exhibition on view at the Museum of Design Atlanta through January 29, 2023. 

In the interview, L’Official quotes from Cooke’s 2021 book Hip-Hop Architecture: “Many have managed to exist simultaneously as successful architects and Black. Few have managed to express their Blackness through their architecture. Within hip-hop culture lies the blueprint for an architecture that is authentically Black with the power to upend the racist structures within the architectural establishment and ignite a new paradigm of creative production.” L’Official references Toni Morrison’s “unapologetic use of codes embedded in Black culture” and “her own struggle for writing that was ‘indisputably black,’” asking Cooke “Does Hip-Hop Architecture also strive for an architecture that is, after Morrison, ‘indisputably black?’”

This year, various media outlets are selecting works by Bard faculty members for their Best of 2022 lists. Some notable mentions include: 

Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s album Sparkle Beings is named one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by the New York Times.

Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True is named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review and The Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker.

Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi’s Botticelli’s Secret is named one of the Best Books of 2022 So Far in nonfiction by the New Yorker. 

James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People is named among 100 Notable Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review. 

Bard Graduate Center's Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen featured in the New York Times Best Art Books of 2022.
 

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose considers the results of the midterms and a growing sense that Donald Trump “is losing his grip on the Republican party.” But she cautions, “to ‘move on’ from Trumpism, to view his regime as an aberration, a four-year mistake, is to fall victim to the dangerous historical amnesia to which Americans seem so susceptible.” She examines Trump’s announcement of his intention to run for president in 2024 and reflects on some of the most divisive moments of his presidency.
 

Botticelli’s Secret by Joseph Luzzi, professor of comparative literature at Bard College, was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker. “In this wide-ranging history, Luzzi considers why the drawings, which illustrated eighty-eight cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, had fallen into oblivion, and charts both Dante’s and Botticelli’s reputations across the ages,” they write. “Many of the ideas for the book came from my classroom discussions with our students,” Luzzi says, making the book’s inclusion on this list “especially gratifying.” In Botticelli’s Secret, Luzzi posits “Botticelli’s drawings as ‘a “poem” in their own regard,’ and as a crucial link in the ‘mapping of the human spirit’s transition’ from one era to the next.”

Conjunctions 79: Onword, the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College which has been in print for more than 40 continuous years, has just been released. “Like many endeavors in the arts,” writes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow, “literary journals are quixotic undertakings, and no matter how vigorous are the idealism, resilience, and stubbornness that sustain them, they are fragile enterprises. Fragile and yet crucial constituents in the literary ecosphere.” As its title suggests, Onword celebrates the continuation of the journal’s storied legacy.

Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, Conjunctions:79, Onword features new work by Fred Moten, Can Xue, John Crowley, Nathaniel Mackey, Sofia Samatar, Yxta Maya Murray, Deb Olin Unferth, Rae Armantrout, G. C. Waldrep, Bonnie Nadzam, Vi Khi Nao, Carole Maso, Julia Alvarez, Fred D’Aguiar, Peter Gizzi, Shane McCrae, a novella by Russell Banks, as well as three previously unpublished poems by C. D. Wright. In his Editor’s Note, Morrow adds, “If the title was ambidextrous, the theme was nonexistent. Our organizing principle was simply great writing by great writers. Yet commonalities, shared themes, did arise over the course of putting the issue together.” He notes that themes of survival, migration, loss and renewal, evolution of mind and place, reimagining and rebuilding, stillness, how to live with disappointment, and how to move onward through difficult spiritual terrains, thread through the works collected in this issue.

Additional contributors to Onword include Leah Newsom, Alyssa Pelish, Jack Shear and Forrest Gander, Cole Swensen, Barrie Jean Borich, Jai Chakrabarti, Karla Kelsey and Nancy Kuhl, Melissa Pritchard, Peter Orner, Minna Zallman Proctor, Yannick Murphy, John Yau, Martine Bellen, and Andrew Mossin.

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. Morrow won PEN America’s 2007 Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing and the 2022 Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Lord Nose Award, given in recognition of a lifetime of superlative work in literary publishing. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine” of 2019, 2020, and 2021 by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019, and The Best American Short Stories (2021, 2022).

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions79. To order a copy, go to bardian.bard.edu/portal/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, email [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) was “unquestionably the greatest artist to take up the challenge” of illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy, writes Graeme Wood for the American Scholar. Botticelli died with his series of 100 drawings, one for each canto, unfinished, and then the illustrations went missing for over 400 years. In Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (W. W. Norton), Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi traces the history of Botticelli’s project, the drawings’ rediscovery, and their role in the resurgence of Renaissance art in the 19th century. 

Valeria Luiselli, celebrated writer and Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, will receive the Inspiration Through the Arts Award at the 92nd Street Y’s Seventh Annual Extraordinary Women Awards on November 14. The awards honor women leading the way and making a difference. The event will take place in person and be streamed online. Juju Chang, coanchor of ABC News’ Nightline, will host this year’s awards ceremony.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the collections of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017)—all published by Coffee House Press. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was described by the Texas Observer as “the first must-read book of the Trump era” and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2017. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s and McSweeney’s. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was a 2019 Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Aspen Words Literary Prize, and shortlisted for the Simpson Literary Prize. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She has been on the faculty at Bard College since 2019.

After being banned from making films for 20 years, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi made This Is Not a Film while under house arrest. “We see him talking to his lawyer on the phone; watching TV; feeding his daughter’s pet iguana, Iggy; politely turning down invitations; and acting out a movie he wants to make about an isolated young woman,” writes Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence, for the New York Review of Books. Tracing Panahi’s work through the decades, Prose draws attention to his intermixture of fiction and documentary, his dedication to the depiction of the lives of Iranian women, and his now regular appearances as a character in his own films, where he appears “genial, kindly, easily amused, remarkably easygoing—an unlikely candidate for an enemy of the state.” Now imprisoned as his newest film debuts in New York, sick with Covid and receiving “intentionally inadequate medical care,” Prose sees Panahi’s films as “a testament to the determination, perseverance, and courage required to keep making art, no matter what.”

Author Violet Kupersmith has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House 2021). Kupersmith’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2023 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kupersmith will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body never ceases to surprise, as it intertwines disparate time periods, locations, and cultures, not to mention realities, and its sentences are worlds in themselves,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “She approaches her subject matter in fresh ways, and the novel’s otherworldly elements are expertly interwoven with the mundane, through an imagination truly rich and strange. This novel is sensual, it is visceral, it is outrageously comic. By turns, Kupersmith makes you squeamish with distaste, shivery with terror, giddy with laughter, awestruck by beauty, and warmed by unexpected tenderness. She always makes you marvel at her inventiveness, enticing you to solve the novel’s central mysteries, as she elicits the widest range of sensations possible. She is a writer of astonishing perspicacity and fluidity of language, and succumbing to her magic is a risk no reader should hesitate to take.”

“What a staggering honor to be in the company of all the literary luminaries who were previous winners of the award or have called Bard home at some point in their careers,” said Kupersmith. “I am just grateful beyond words to the prize committee for this recognition and for such an extraordinary gift. And I cannot wait to plant myself in this fertile intellectual environment next fall and grow something strange and new.”

Violet Kupersmith was born in central Pennsylvania in 1989 and later moved with her family to the Philadelphia suburbs. Her father is a white American and her mother is from Da Nang, Vietnam. Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the fall of Saigon in 1975, and were resettled in Port Arthur, Texas. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 2011, Violet spent a year teaching English in Tra Vinh, Vietnam, on a Fulbright Fellowship. Between 2013 and 2015, she lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam. She was the 2015–2016 David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and is the recipient of a 2022 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her short story collection The Frangipani Hotel was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2014. violetkupersmith.com

Bard College Assistant Professor of Written Arts Jenny Xie’s new poetry collection, The Rupture Tense, has been selected as a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for poetry. Beginning with poems inspired by photojournalist Li Zhensheng’s rare images of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense recovers ancestral history through an investigation of state-sanctioned memory loss and intergenerational trauma. Xie’s debut collection of poems, Eye Level, was also selected as a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for poetry.

Winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 16 at the invitation-only 73^rd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Two lifetime achievement awards will also be presented as part of the evening’s ceremony: Art Spiegelman will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented by Bard College Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman, and Tracie D. Hall will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

“This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion,” writes Jennifer Szalai of Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s Stay True for the New York Times. Calling Stay True “quietly wrenching,” and Hsu himself “a subtle writer, not a showy one,” Szalai hesitates to put the memoir too tidily into any one box. “To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too,” she writes. Instead, she sees Stay True as a patient exploration of a friendship cut short by tragedy, and the ways in which such bonds can linger on in our lives and writing. The memoir was also reviewed in the Washington Post, and Hsu was profiled on Vulture, as well as interviewed by CBS News, GQ, NPR, and others.

Assistant Professor of Written Arts Jenny Xie’s newest poetry collection, The Rupture Tense, evokes the spoken and unspoken, seen and unseen experiences of China’s Cultural Revolution as its painful legacy is passed through the generations. “In the book, the poet not only peeks at her family’s past and their country’s history, but also explores the subversive power to be found in examining what has been concealed or overlooked: Li’s long-hidden archive, the older generations’ silence about the past, and the unexamined trauma that goes on shaping how family members relate to one another,” writes Han Zhang for the New York Times. 

The Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the tenured appointment of Dawn Lundy Martin to the faculty of Bard College as Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Written Arts Program at the rank of full professor. Her appointment begins in the spring 2023 semester. Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering; and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin is also co-editor (with Erica Hunt) of Letters to the Future: BLACK Women / Radical WRITING. Laceration: Poems is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. When a Person Goes Missing: A Family Memoir is forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is the recipient of a 2016 Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, a 2016 poetry grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2018 NEA grant in nonfiction, and a 2022 United States Artist Fellowship. In 2016 Martin cofounded the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Twenty-five years ago, she cofounded the Third Wave Fund, which resources youth-led intersectional gender justice movements for BIPOC young people. Martin has been teaching at Bard since 2018.

“Economic punishment almost never has the desired effect of bringing down a tyranny or stopping violent aggression,” writes Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard, observing that sanctions against Russia have not stopped Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Drawing parallels to the practice of bombing civilians during World War II and the War in Vietnam, Buruma adds, “If anything, shared hardship tends to rally people around a common enemy and strengthen support for their leaders.”

As the world watches the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant suffer “weeks of shelling,” the potential for “another nuclear disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl explosion” looms large, writes Bard alum C Mandler ’19 for CBS news. The similarities between Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia are as much organizational as they are structural, says Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs for Bard College. Both share “an environment… in which people are disincentivized from communicating genuine problems to higher-ups,” Becker says, which could result in a “series of mistakes, which are reinforced by a system which doesn't encourage transparent communication.” A nuclear disaster in Ukraine would be catastrophic on “both human and geopolitical” levels, Becker says. Should a nuclear disaster occur, “it will be difficult to imagine the path forward after that,” he said.

 

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College Daniel Mendelsohn has won the 2022 Malaparte Prize, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers and one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards. Mendelsohn won the prize for his body of work in literary criticism, translation, and narrative nonfiction. He will receive the prize at an awards ceremony held on the island of Capri at the beginning of October. 

“It is thrilling and somewhat daunting to be in the company of such writers as Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow as a recipient of this prize,” Mendelsohn said, on learning of the prize. “And, as a person who has devoted his life to the study of European civilization, I am particularly moved to have my work so warmly appreciated in Italy, a country whose culture I, as a classics scholar, particularly revere.”

In its citation, the Malaparte jury singled out the themes of exile, displacement, and memory in Mendelsohn’s three major memoirs, especially The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an investigation into the deaths of six relatives who perished during the Holocaust in what is now Ukraine. “The choice of Mendelsohn may seem like a tribute to current events and to Ukraine,” says Gabriella Buontempo of the 2022 Malaparte Prize decision. “In truth, at the time we decided it, the Russian aggression did not start. But when literature is really well addressed, almost naturally its themes turn out to be current.”

Named for Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist and short story writer who died in 1957, the Malaparte Prize has been awarded to Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, Donna Tartt, and Vaclav Havel, among others. The jury of this year’s award included: Leonardo Colombati, Giordano Bruno Guerri, Giuseppe Merlino, Silvio Perrella, Emanuele Trevi and Marina Valensise.

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, 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 first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories,” writes Hua Hsu, professor of literature. In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Stay True, published in the New Yorker under the title “My Dad and Kurt Cobain,” Hsu writes about his relationship with his parents, immigrant identity, and music. “My father’s record collection had the effect of making music seem uncool to me,” he writes. However, through years of correspondence via fax and phone, the two would come to relate to each other through a mutual appreciation of American popular music. “We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle,” Hsu writes. “We were enthralled by the same music, but we related to it differently.” Hsu weaves personal history and cultural critique, exploring themes of assimilation and double consciousness. On the former, he writes: “Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never quite be perfect.” Stay True: A Memoir will be published September 27, 2022.

When Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was asked to guest-edit the 2022 iteration of the O. Henry Prizes, a “fundamental thing” had changed: the prize was now open to any writer, not only “American” ones. “That alone was reason enough for me to accept,” Luiselli writes in Poets & Writers. The rule had “accumulated a number of absurd consequences,” she writes, including the exclusion of authors who “had been living, sometimes entire lifetimes, in the United States” but lacked a U.S. birth certificate. This barrier, she argues, was not only exclusionary, but damaging to literary culture: “Imposing upon literature rules written in some government office, in a nation’s obscure and labyrinthine immigration system, is not only absurd, but simply contrary to the very nature of literature.” The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Luiselli, ultimately included 10 stories in translation out of a total of 20 selected works. Their inclusion is a reflection of their excellence, Luiselli writes, serving as a recognition of “a moment in which we are beginning to open the doors and windows of this old locked-down house, letting new light and air come in to stir us powerfully into movement.”

Bard College Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi has been selected for a Public Scholars award in the amount of $60,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) in support of his book project, Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood. The NEH Public Scholars award funds well-researched books in the humanities aimed at a broad public audience. Luzzi’s grant supports researching and writing a cultural history of the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence, Italy, an exceptional institution for the care and protection of abandoned children and a notable example of both early Italian Renaissance architecture and the power of Renaissance humanist principles, from 1419 to the present.

“I am deeply honored and grateful for this generous grant from the NEH,” says Luzzi. “This support will enable me to tell the dramatic story of how the Hospital of the Innocents saved the lives of so many children while also reflecting the remarkable cultural and creative developments that were transforming Florence into a center of the European Renaissance. I am especially committed to exploring how these discoveries made by the Hospital of the Innocents centuries ago can be a vital source for our own understanding of childhood today.”

The “Innocenti,” as the hospital is called, originated as a home for babies and children born “out-of-wedlock” or who could not be raised by their parents due to illness, poverty, or other reasons. Initiated by a charitable bequest from philanthropist Francesco di Marco Datini, the orphanage was one of the first major architectural commissions of Filippo Brunelleschi, a pioneer of Renaissance architecture who also engineered the Duomo, the massive cupola of the Florence Cathedral. One of the most recognizable buildings in all of Florence, the Innocenti is known for its dignified and compassionate design.

From its opening until 1875, the Innocenti rescued more than 400,000 abandoned children from starvation, exposure, and other threats, offering them care that went beyond mere physical protection. The Innocenti’s pedagogical practices revolutionized childhood educational curricula, moving away from being primarily religious towards a more humanistic understanding, grounded in a rediscovery of the morals, values, beliefs, and cultural forms of ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The foundlings were taught music and the arts, previously reserved for the Florentine elite, and “unwanted” girls were taught a trade and provided with a dowry, so that they could enjoy economic independence or find suitable marriages. In the 19th century, the Innocenti modernized medical science to create the conceptual underpinning for the birth of the field of pediatrics as a viable scientific discipline. To this day, Andrea della Robbia’s high-relief, glazed blue figures of swaddled babies that have adorned the façade of the Innocenti since 1487 are still the inspiration for the American Academy of Pediatrics insignia. 

With the support of the NEH Public Scholars award, Luzzi will conduct research, travel, and writing leading towards the publication of a comprehensive history of the Innocenti and its groundbreaking impact over six centuries. Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood will be the first deeply researched, nonfiction book on the Hospital of the Innocents, and the first work to combine the history of childhood and children, children’s rights, and Renaissance Studies, encapsulating rich analysis on the history of art, architecture, medicine, and Italian culture and society. 

Viveca Lawrie wasn’t looking to come to Bard. She was discovered—by a member of the faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. 
 
Lawrie recalls that Edward Carroll, who teaches trumpet, heard her play and asked her to apply to Bard. She enrolled in the Conservatory, as a bachelor of music student in trumpet performance, and in the College, as a bachelor or arts student majoring in French studies, with a concentration in medieval studies. “The double degree appealed to me,” says the Sedona, Arizona, native. “Trumpet and French are two things I enjoy.” 
 
Her first impression of Bard was of “a beautiful campus.” Her next impression was one of welcome. “It’s a small community and I felt part of it right away.” She soon met Karen Sullivan, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture, “and that set me up for the rest of my academic career.” She credits Sullivan with teaching classes “that were 100 percent fun,” and Carroll with “being on board with my love of contemporary music, and help with the technical side” of horn virtuosity. “Bard is very good at matching you with someone,” she says. 
 
At the Conservatory, she and colleagues played together and critiqued one another in “brass class.” “We are a tight-knit group. We really support each other,” she says. “Elsewhere there’s competition, but it’s never been that way here.” 
 
At Bard, “I definitely learned how to write an essay and push the boundaries of how to study.” A surprise was realizing how much she enjoyed academic research and “learning history from the perspective not of the conqueror but of those not in power. This is something that will forever influence how I approach all my research.”
 
With work for her Senior Project in Welsh Arthurian legend, and her Graduation Recital in trumpet, she has little time for extracurricular activities. But she works in the Conservatory audio-visual office on live streaming and recording, and gave AV assistance to a student-organized concert to benefit a Conservatory student whose family is suffering from consequences of COVID-19.
 
For Lawrie, that kind of outreach exemplifies the Bard community. “I meet people who are interested in what I’m doing and I’m open to what they’re doing. It’s healthy that we all show such curiosity.”
 
After graduation, she plans to apply to an MA program in Wales, then a PhD in comparative literature; she also wants to commission composers of contemporary works. “I think people should have multiple options,” she says.
 
How should high school students prepare for Bard? “Come with an open mind. I can’t stress enough how wonderful a preparation Bard’s Language and Thinking Program is for thinking about the world.” She adds, “And come uncomfortable, because you won’t be used to such focused thinking. But don’t feel afraid of it, and be open to listening to others.” 
 
Bard has changed Lawrie’s life in myriad ways. “I am a lot more confident,” she says. “As a homeschooled student, I learned to live on my own. Here I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ve learned—through the support system, counseling, and Upper College students who do tutorials—how to deal when things don’t go my way. Every professor lets me know I can come to them with any problem, especially in the Conservatory. And the French Studies Program has more of a support system than I could imagine, in terms of recommendations, tutoring, wanting to help. Not a lot of colleges have that.”

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn talks with David Naimon, host of Tin House’s Between the Covers podcast, about Mendelsohn’s book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, which weaves together the stories of three exiled writers Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald. Their conversation circles around narrative structures and representation, Greek and Hebrew modes of storytelling, ancient classical and biblical texts, literary digression, ring composition, family histories, the Holocaust, Homer, Cavafy, Proust, and Joyce, among other topics. “As we all know, just to make an obvious point, we’re living in a world in which the power of narratives—true, false, deliberately false, accidentally false—is something of vital importance in our lives and that is our existential struggle now. How do you know when something’s true? How do you tell it to people? Will they believe it? I think these are rather urgent points,” says Mendelsohn.

Emily Schmall ’05, who reports on Sri Lanka for the New York Times, discusses the country’s recent protests and presidential resignation with her colleague German Lopez for the Times’ Morning Newsletter. Schmall talks about the conditions leading up to the civil uprising in Colombo, how it began, and how unexpectedly nonviolent and orderly the protestors and activists were. “After about 24 hours, a gleefulness overtook the place, and some people swam in the president’s pool. They had done it: They had forced this extremely powerful president–who was accused of war crimes, who was feared–to leave his own home and even the country. But they did it peacefully, without taking up arms,” said Schmall.

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College, has won a Rabkin Prize of $50,000 for his work in visual art journalism. L’Official is one of eight visual art journalists to receive a Rabkin Prize from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Jurors for this sixth cycle of awards were: Eric Gibson (Arts in Review editor of the Wall Street Journal), Sasha Anawalt (Professor Emerita of Journalism at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), and Paul Schmelzer (Founder of The Ostracon: Dispatches from Beyond Contemporary Art’s Center).

“I am humbled to be recognized among such a brilliant group of fellow recipients by the Rabkin Foundation. Thank you to the jurors, the anonymous nominators, the Rabkin Trustees, and—most especially—to all the editors and writers and readers who make the work of arts criticism both possible and worthwhile,” said L’Official.

Peter L’Official (he/him) is a writer, arts critic, and teacher of literature and American studies from The Bronx, NY. He is an associate professor in literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, and on how the visual arts intersect with literature, place, and architecture. He is also the project coordinator for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a grant supported by the Mellon Foundation “Humanities for All Times” Initiative. 

L'Official is the author of Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press in 2020. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Village Voice, and other publications, and he is on the editorial board of The European Review of Books. He has written catalogue essays for exhibitions by artists such as Carl Craig and Becky Suss, and his next book project will explore the intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America. L’Official has a B.A. in English from Williams College, and an M.A. in Journalism from New York University’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. He received his Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University, and was formerly a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University in 2014-15. 

Now in its sixth cycle, the Rabkin Prize started in 2017. To date, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has given a total of $2,775,000 to individual art writers. The award program is by nomination only. A distinguished group of 16 nominators, working in the visual arts in all parts of the country, provided the list of potential winners. The nominators were asked to identify, “The essential visual art journalist working in your part of the country.” Candidates for the award submitted two recent published articles and a brief curriculum vita. Writers can be re-nominated and are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize. This is an annual program and a central initiative of the foundation.

This cycle’s other winning journalists include: Shana Nys Dambrot (Los Angeles); Bryn Evans (Decatur, Georgia); Joe Fyfe (New York City); Stacy Pratt (Tulsa); Darryl F. Ratcliff, II (Dallas); Jeanne Claire van Ryzin (Austin); Margo Vansynghel (Seattle). 

“How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us?” asks Joe Vallese ’04 MAT ’05, editor of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls the anthology “full of surprises.” Comprised of 25 essays on horror from contemporary queer authors, including 2018 Bard Fiction Prize winner Carmen Maria Machado, “the pieces are a brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking.” Awarding it a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly says “there’s not a weak piece in the pack.” It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror will be published October 4, 2022, by Feminist Press and is available for preorder now.

“Sophocles had no trouble with structure,” writes Mary Norris for the New Yorker, struggling to find a way into her own tale. Taking a page from the late John Bennet, her friend and longtime editor for the New Yorker, Norris started at the beginning, telling the story of her trip to see Antigone with Bennet before his recent death. The Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, Antigone, based on an original translation by Karagodins, was staged outdoors at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, the sculpture park and museum created by the late Bard professor and alumnus Harvey Fite ’30. “The setting was evocative: birdsong and scudding clouds at twilight, with the mountains for a backdrop,” Norris writes. While Bennet was studied in the play, Norris found herself more unfamiliar, and as such found Tiresias’s entrance to be the play’s most startling development. “While the other performers all seemed afraid of stumbling on the paving stones (Fite actually died of a fall in his own quarry), Tiresias alone, blind and urgent, had a motive to place each foot squarely on the earth.” Shortly after the two saw Antigone, Bennet was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Two weeks later, on July 9, he died, at home,” Norris writes, “releasing a great commingling of sadness and gratitude among family and friends, our lives graven where his plow had gone.”

We came very close to an even darker reality on January 6, 2021, writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose for the Guardian. “There’s a very particular, very specific chill we feel when our worst suspicions have been confirmed, when our darkest fears and imaginings turn out to be mere shadows of reality,” Prose writes. Alongside Lloyd Green, Simon Balto, and Geoffrey Kabaservice, Prose offers a sobering reflection on the new evidence brought forth by the January 6 hearings and just how close the United States came to the brink. “The evidence presented in this initial hearing was so clear, so convincing, I cannot imagine anyone not being persuaded unless they have totally lost touch with reason and reality,” she writes, “in which case I truly cannot imagine the future of this country: what will happen to us next.”

The new Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College welcomes its inaugural cohort of seven writers, Danielle Elizabeth Chin, Neşe Devenot ’09, Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander, Mona Kareem, Madhu Kaza, Obi Nwizu, and Dianca London Potts, this summer. The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 4 through June 26, 2022. During their residency, fellows reside on Bard’s campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works.

“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.

During their residency, Hurston Fellows may participate in a daily program of workshops and meetings, offered in collaboration with the Bard College Institute of Writing and Thinking. However, fellows may also choose to spend their time working, writing, and researching independently. The residency includes visits by literary agents and editors, as well as readings and lectures by established writers and scholars. This summer, the two guest lecturers include Carolyn Ferrell, author of Miss Metropolitan, which was recently shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and literary agent Charlotte Sheedy of Sheedy Lit in conversation with her client Jive Poetic about the agent-author relationship and how an idea becomes a book. Fellows will also be invited back to Bard College in October of the fellowship year for a weekend-long meeting and workshop. 

Danielle Elizabeth Chin graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marymount Manhattan College in May 2013 with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in English and World Literatures and a minor in Creative Writing before receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from The New School in Creative Writing with a concentration in creative nonfiction. She has been an Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College since 2015, where she has taught Introduction to Creative Writing I, Introduction to Creative Writing II, Intermediate Creative Writing, an Independent Study in Nonfiction, and a Special Topics course. She has also served as a Writing Assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and for the CUNY EDGE program. Her other professional experiences include working as a research assistant for poet David Lehman, a teaching assistant for novelist Sigrid Nunez, and an assistant at a literary agency.  Her work has appeared in The Inquisitive Eater, The Best American Poetry Blog, and Side B Magazine. 

Neşe Devenot ’09 received her PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy, the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”), and radical poetics. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College in philosophy and literature. Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), University of Cincinnati, and is a Lecturer and Medical Humanities Program Assistant at Pennsylvania State University. She has held positions as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Medicine, Society, and Culture, in the Bioethics Department at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University (2018-20) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the Humanities Program and English Department at University of Puget Sound (2015-18). Her research explores the function of metaphor and other literary devices in verbal accounts of psychedelic experiences. She was awarded “Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies” from Breaking Convention in 2016 and received the Article Prize for best publication in Romanticism Studies from European Romantic Review in 2020. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. She was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which she moderated during 2011-13, and has presented on psychedelics at conferences in the United States, Mexico, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander received her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from Saint Joseph’s University in 2005, M.S.W. from University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work in 1995, and B.A. in sociology and history/gender studies from Saint Lawrence University in 1993. Before teaching, she worked as a social worker and counselor. She is a Visiting and Senior Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the Haub School of Business, School of Health and Education, and College of Arts and Sciences. She also serves as a diversity consultant at Saint Joseph’s University. Her research interests include anti-racist and social justice pedagogies, womanist and feminist epistemologies, teacher preparation educational programs, and intersectionality within leadership development. She presents on topics including leadership and student advocacy; mentoring and feminist perspectives; global engagement, training, and development; and social work and mental health. She has won several awards and special recognitions including the Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching for the Gender Studies Program Department at Saint Joseph’s University (2014).

Mona Kareem holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University of Kuwait. She is a research fellow at Center for Humanities at Tufts University (2021-2022) and a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. She has taught at Princeton, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. She was an affiliated research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. She has won several awards and honors including a nomination for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 for her English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within, which was reprinted by English PEN in 2017.

Madhu H. Kaza received her MFA in fiction, M.Phil and MA in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in English from the University of Michigan. She serves as Associate Director of Microcollege Program and Faculty Development at the Bard Prison Initiative and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation and her own writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Guernica, The Yale Review, Two Lines, Gulf Coast, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a non-fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Yaddo residency. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and has taught at New York University, The New School, and at Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, among other institutions. 

Obi Nwizu received her MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom and her BA in Print Journalism from Georgia State University. Born in Anambra State, Nigeria, raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but currently calling Harlem home, Nwizu is a lover of month-long international vacations, vegan food, afrobeat, and rom-coms. When not writing, she teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and composition writing for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Selected publications include “Gathered Pieces of the Sun” in The Almbec, “Grapeseed Fields” in Torch Literary Arts, and “Lust Painted Walls” in Imagine Curve.

Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School, MA in English and MA in Humanities from Arcadia University, and BA in English from Temple University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at Pratt Institute and teaches writing courses at Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College at The New School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Lenny Letter, The Village Voice, Vice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink / Simon and Schuster.

About the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College is a 3-week residential program designed to enable writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, specifically, those who are without access to sabbaticals or their institution’s research funding. We seek fellows who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book length work. Prospective Fellows should submit a vita, a letter of recommendation by someone familiar with their work, and an abstract of the project they wish to work on during the three-week residency. The abstract should not exceed 2000 words. Applicants need a college or university affiliation and should have a minimum of five years of teaching as an adjunct, lecturer or visiting professor. The application deadline is April 15, 2023. All applicants will be notified of the admission Committee’s decision by May 15, 2023. To submit materials or for questions please email [email protected].
 

Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself Features New Work from Stephen Graham Jones, Bronka Nowicka, Coral Bracho, Shane McCrae, Rick Moody, Kathryn Davis, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and Many Others

Humans have a genius for fear. Terrors of every imaginable kind surround us, as often as not the wily demons of our own creation, and grow more ghastly, untenable, and malignant with every passing generation. “Whether founded in truth or imagination, fear has a toxic genius for pervading our lives,” writes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow. “It has many faces and many means of forcing itself upon us.” 

Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College, which is now celebrating more than 40 years of continuous publication—collects fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from 30 contemporary writers who are willing to interrogate the wide spectrum of apprehensions, terrors, and dread we humans experience. “War, inequality, abandonment, an evolving climate catastrophe born of the relentless degradation of our planet, this tenacious pandemic, the unknown—such are only a few realities that daily generate existential fear . . . ” Morrow continues in his Editor’s Note. “Yet fear is ubiquitous in our myths and fairy tales, songs and theater, art and literature, and the historical legacies of every culture. Fear and its many nemeses—confidence, bravery, faith among them—are locked in a mortal dance in every narrative humans create, both in life and on the page.”

Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, Fear Itself features new fiction from Ray Bradbury Prize winner Stephen Graham Jones, novelist and PEN/Martha Albrand Prize winner Rick Moody, Shirley Jackson Award winner Jeffrey Ford, and Jerusalem Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. The first English translations of “Two Stories” by Polish writer Bronka Nowicka and “Like A Disease Whose Threshold No One Can Cross, She Says,” by Mexican poet Coral Bracho also appear in the issue along with new poems by Whiting Award winner Shane McCrae, Elizabeth Robinson, and Jessica Reed, among others.

Additional contributors to Fear Itself include Julia Elliott, Bennett Sims, Akil Kumarasamy, Katheryn Davis, Kristine Ong Muslim, Brandon Hobson, Monica Datta, Michael Harris Cohen, Brian Evenson, Barbara Tomash, Matthew Baker, Tori Malcangio, Bin Ramke, Rebecca Lilly, Genevieve Valentine, Terese Svoboda, Rob Walsh, Mary Kuryla, Troy Jollimore, Quintan Ana Wikswo, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019, and The Best American Short Stories 2021.

“The process of creating art, much like the Black experience in America, relies on an innate ability to see beyond the limits of circumstance and a belief that something beautiful will come through faith and commitment,” writes Bard alumna Evan Nicole Brown ’16. In a report for the Hollywood Reporter on the history of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and its current exhibition at SoFi Stadium—a first for the Inglewood facility—Brown documents the importance of this public exhibition of the more than 50-year-old collection of Black art. The exhibition, currently on display through June 2022, features “more than 70 works of art by prominent Black artists,” and serves to “chronicle, in a chronological way, the evolution of African-American life in the United States through the lens of artistic contribution,” says Khalil Kinsey, chief curator of the collection and son of the founders of the Kinsey Collection.

CLMP awarded Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and editor of Conjunctions, the 2022 Lord Nose Award. Morrow was chosen by CLMP “in recognition of a lifetime of superlative work in literary publishing,” including his own published works, as well as his efforts as the founder and editor of Conjunctions. Morrow is the recipient of many awards, including the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, and has taught at Bard since 1990.

Bard College alumnus Gabriel Braunstein ’20 is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I hope to serve a new community as best I can,” said Braunstein. “I am excited to work in a classroom and meet my new neighbors.”

Braunstein graduated from Bard in 2020 with a degree in literature. He will serve as an education volunteer in the Eastern Caribbean, working in cooperation with local community and partner organizations on sustainable development projects.

The volunteer cohorts are made up of both first-time volunteers and volunteers who were evacuated in early 2020. Upon finishing a three-month training, volunteers will collaborate with their host communities on locally prioritized projects in one of Peace Corps’ six sectors—agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health or youth in development—and all will engage in COVID-19 response and recovery work.

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Shuangting Xiong as Assistant Professor of Chinese. Xiong’s tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022-2023 academic year. Her research focus is twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. “I’m very excited to join the community at Bard in the fall, and to explore and settle in the beautiful Hudson Valley area with my dog, a two-year old golden retriever named Mira,” said Xiong.
 
Shuangting Xiong received her PhD in Chinese from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She specializes in twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. She is particularly interested in the relation between emotion and politics and the mediating role aesthetics plays in it. Her current book-length project examines the evolution of melodramatic narratives of family, kinship, and the Chinese revolution across different media in twentieth-century China. Her work aims to create cross-cultural dialogues, highlighting the vital influences that global circulations of materials and ideas have on aesthetic debates in the Chinese context.

As museums and exhibition spaces make efforts to showcase more diverse artwork and perspectives, in her review of Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers, Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, considers the cost for the artist. Noting Khan’s usage of collage and texture, Ramadan calls the exhibition “energetic and ambitious,” with many pieces serving as “a deliberate reflection on capitalist economies of extraction and imperialist trade routes that continually ravage the Middle East and South Asia.” Larger questions arise when it comes to representation and its relation to the labor of artists of color, however. In attempting to to reeducate its audience to “the fundamentals of Islam,” the exhibition “encourag[es] an anthropological approach to the work,” Ramadan writes. “Ultimately, I Am an Archive raises urgent questions about the kind of ‘educational’ labor art institutions expect artists of color to perform in return for their inclusion.”
 
Read More in Art Papers

Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.

Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”

Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.

Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.

Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded three Bard faculty members 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu and Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock Peter Filkins have been named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. Incoming Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities Thomas Chatterton Williams, who will begin teaching at the College in spring 2023, has also been selected.  Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Mengestu, Filkins, and Williams were among a diverse group of 180 exceptional artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2022 Fellowship. Mengestu was awarded a Fellowship for his work in fiction, Filkins for his work in biography, and Williams for his work in general nonfiction.

“We are proud of and grateful for Bard’s 2022 Fellows, who represent an astonishing range of achievement,” said Bard Dean of the College Deirdre d’Albertis. “Living and learning alongside colleagues who have been recognized this year–and in the past–by the Guggenheim Foundation inspires us all to celebrate the vital work of artists, writers, and scholars in our community.”

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2022 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names(Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. In its cover page review of All Our Names, the New York Times Book Review said “You can’t turn the pages fast enough, and when you’re done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . While questions of race, ethnicity, and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully—but never didactically—kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.” BA, Georgetown University; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2016.

Peter Filkins teaches courses in translation at Bard College, and also creative writing and literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he is Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature. Filkins has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to the International Research Center for Culture Studies in Vienna for Spring 2023. He has published five books of poetry, Water / Music (2021), The View We’re Granted (2012), Augustine’s Vision (2010), After Homer(2002), and What She Knew (1998). He is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken(2006), as well as her novels, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann (1999). In addition, he has translated H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey (2008), Panorama (2011), and The Wall (2014), and has published a biography, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (2019). Co-winner of the 2013 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, he has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, from the American Academy in Berlin, and from the Fulbright Commission of Austria. He has been awarded the Stover Prize in Poetry from Southwest Review, the New American Press Chapbook Award, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv – Marbach. Previously he was the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association and received a Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian government, as well as serving as Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. BA, Williams College; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2007.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a columnist at Harper’s, a 2019 New America Fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. He  joins Bard as a Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities beginning in Spring 2023.

Sandra Cisneros to Read at Bard on Wednesday, April 6

The Big Read Hudson Valley kicks off this week with a reading from Sandra Cisneros, author of the 2022 Big Read book selection, The House on Mango Street, at the Fisher Center on Wednesday, April 6. Livestreaming of this event is made possible by Radio Kingston.

Cisneros’s novel “is just as relevant now as it was when first published in 1984,” writes Emma Cariello for Chronogram. “It follows Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Latina girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The book explores immigration, displacement, and what home means.” 

“Thinking about the influx of residents that this area has seen during the pandemic, and people being displaced due to gentrification, it’s a perfect fit for this community,” says Karen Unger, Associate Vice President of the Office of Institutional Support at Bard College. Unger thinks everyone in the Hudson Valley would benefit from reading The House on Mango Street, and so does the National Endowment for the Arts. Bard has received a $19,985 grant from the NEA to support the series. Events take place April 6–30 with reading groups, performances, workshops, and special events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. The Big Read Hudson Valley is a collaboration between Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine.

After coauthoring Flavors of Oakland at 17, it might have seemed inevitable that Bard alum Elazar Sontag would end up as the restaurant editor for a major publication. But according to Sontag, who worked for years in the food industry, that hasn’t always been the plan. “I didn’t work in restaurants because I thought it would make me a better food writer,” Sontag said in an interview with the Oaklandside. “I worked in restaurants because I truly believed that I was going to become a restaurant cook and eventually a chef.” Several experiences led Sontag to a different path, however, who noted that “kitchens are complicated places to be queer.” Now, in his new role as restaurant editor for Bon Appétit, Sontag will continue writing about queer food culture. “So much of what I love to cover as a writer and editor is about these queer restaurant spaces,” he says. “It feels like such a gift that I get to tell the stories and celebrate these spaces that when I was a teen, I didn’t even know that existed.”
 
Read More on the Oaklandside

As news of the war in Ukraine proliferated Western news cycles, what information reached Russians and how? Masha Gessen, distinguished writer in residence, spoke with Ezra Klein on the Ezra Klein Show about the information vacuum experienced by Russians, Vladimir Putin’s historical conception of himself, and how the sanctions deployed by the United States and others may not, ultimately, sway Putin’s current course of action. “The way that the narrative of sanctions works is it matches the working definition of insanity,” Gessen says. “Sanctions are the thing that never works, that the United States and other Western countries try over and over again expecting a different outcome.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Gessen outlined what they see as the likeliest paths forward for the war and its global implications.
 
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Even if victory seems elusive, assisting resistance remains crucial, writes Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, for Bloomberg. Citing a history of citizen resistance to occupying forces and “shadow armies,” the West’s decision to bolster the Ukrainian army is undoubtedly the right move, he argues, no matter the outcome of the war. “However puny in military terms, armed resistance undercuts that projection of omnipotence,” Buruma says. “It reveals the vulnerability of the aggressor, just by showing that people can fight back. That sense of vulnerability can grow over time.”
 
Read More in Bloomberg

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic, community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Big Read Hudson Valley, which will take place April 6–30, 2022, is a collaboration between Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine.

The Big Read Hudson Valley will kick off with a reading from Sandra Cisneros, author of the 2022 Big Read book selection, The House on Mango Street, on April 6 at the Fisher Center. Cisneros will read from her acclaimed novel followed by a conversation in English and Spanish with Mariel Fiori and Dinaw Mengestu.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros has been recognized by critics, professors, and readers alike as one of most important contributions to modern literature. This landmark story collection relates the triumphant coming-of-age of young Esperanza Cordero who finds her own voice and inner potential to overcome the impediments of poverty, gender, and her Chicana-American heritage.

Live-streaming of this event made possible by Radio Kingston.

Signed copies of The House on Mango Street will be available for sale in the lobby from Oblong Books and Music.

Sandra Cisneros’s appearance made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Kingston.

Katy Schneider ’14, features editor for New York magazine, won the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) Next Award for journalists under 30. ASME Next Award winners are judged by their portfolio of work and are chosen each year for “their potential to make significant contributions to magazine journalism.” Schneider and the rest of this year’s winners will be honored at ASME’s annual award presentation on April 5, 2022.
 
Read More in New York
 
Read More on the Verge, as Reported by Aude White ’12

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Hua Hsu as Professor of Literature. Hsu will begin this tenured appointment in 2022-2023 academic year.
 
“Welcoming a public thinker of Hua Hsu’s stature to Bard is an event truly to be celebrated by the entire community. He brings tremendous intellectual range and energy to Languages and Literature, building on Bard’s traditional commitment to practicing artists who are at the forefront of their fields,” said Deirdre d’Albertis, Bard’s Dean of the College. “As a scholar and writer, Hua Hsu promises to strengthen and expand our offerings in American Studies, Asian Studies, Written Arts, and Literature. I am grateful in particular to Professors Nathan Shockey and Peter L’Official for their inspired efforts in recruiting Professor Hsu.” 
 
“I'm thankful to President Botstein and Dean d’Albertis for their enthusiasm and faith in me,” said Hsu. “I’m delighted to join Bard at a moment of such great ambition and possibility, and I look forward to learning the ins and outs of this singular institution.”
 
Hua Hsu is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming memoir Stay True (Doubleday, 2022). Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker, having previously contributed to Artforum, Slate, the Village Voice, and The Wire (UK). He served on the editorial board of A New Literary History of America (HUP, 2009) and his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He currently serves on the boards of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics of color. Hsu previously taught at Vassar College. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. 

Lucy Sante—writer, critic, and Bard faculty member—pens an intimate personal essay for Vanity Fair tracing her journey as a trans woman, from the carefully repressed feelings of her adolescence to finally coming out last year. “Now I am aware that I live, as we all do, in a cloud of unknowing, where certainties break down and categories become liquid,” she writes. “None of us really knows anything except provisionally. Now, as Lou Reed put it, ‘I’m set free/ to find a new illusion.’” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
 

Photojournalist, documentarian, and activist Steve Schapiro ’55, who died on January 15, 2022, leaves behind a body of work that began with his capturing of the civil rights movement and continued through the current political era. “Over a six-decade career, Mr. Schapiro trained his camera’s eye on an astonishing array of people across the American landscape as he sought to capture the emotional heart of his subjects,” writes Katharine Q. Seelye in a remembrance of Schapiro for the New York Times. His work, which has been featured in magazines and museums alike, focused on a diversity of subjects, from movie stars to migrant workers. His photographs of James Baldwin’s 1963 tour of the South illustrated later editions of The Fire Next Time. After his death was announced, tributes to Shapiro poured out online, including remembrances from Barbra Streisand and Ava DuVernay. He graduated from Bard in 1955 with a degree in literature. He was a transfer student to Bard, which he found “more suitable for free spirits like himself.”
 
Full Story in the New York Times

“With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life,” writes Elias Canetti in The Book Against Death. Visiting Professor of Literature Peter Filkins has translated from the German a selection of Canetti’s short writings—spanning nearly 60 years—about the nature of death. “Canetti’s notes are neither morose nor gloomy,” Filkins observes. “Sardonic, mercurial, aghast, enigmatic, passionate—they are fueled by the fire of a man writing for life against death, in a century and locale suffused with the latter.”

Dante’s biographers have their work cut out for them, writes Joseph Luzzi, professor of comparative literature, for the New York Times. Reviewing Dante: A Life, a new biography of Dante by historian and novelist Alessandro Barbero, Luzzi comments on the competing approaches to writing about the life of the mysterious poet. “The biographer must ultimately choose: Either hew to the evidence and ferret out whatever rare nugget about Dante’s life remains uncovered, or surrender to the genius of the work he called his ‘Comedìa’ and try to broker a fragile peace between literary interpretation and life writing,” Luzzi writes. Instead, Barbero takes a dual approach, which, Luzzi argues, works both in his favor and against him.

Full Story in the New York Times