News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, a new memoir by Bard alumna and poet Jane Wong ’07, documents her childhood growing up as a second-generation working class American, falling asleep on bags of rice in her immigrant parents’ Atlantic City Chinese restaurant, which her father eventually loses to his gambling addiction. “The poet Wong’s book is reminiscent of an abstract watercolor, free-flowing, nonlinear, without clear borders,” writes Qian Julie Wang for the New York Times. Ultimately a love song, Wong’s memoir “explore[s] the many forms of hunger that come with being Asian in America.” Wong’s memoir was also reviewed in the Boston Globe, and she was interviewed about her book for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Lit Hub.

Interviews:
LA Review of Books: “Tenderness and Ferocity Go Hand in Hand: A Conversation with Jane Wong”
Lit Hub: “Jane Wong: How Non-Linearity Mirrors the Experience of Migration”
 

Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, has been selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz aims to conduct her research in São Paulo and will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 
 
Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India for the 2023–24 academic year. His project, “From the River to Tomorrow: Perceptions of Kolkata’s Water Future,” studies the perceptions of Kolkata’s water future among urban planners, infrastructure experts, and communities—such as those who work in river transport, fishing, and who live in housing along the banks—most vulnerable to water changes along the Hooghly River. He will analyze the dominant narratives of the city and river’s future and reference scientific and planning literature in understanding the points of confluence and divergence between scientific and colloquial understandings of the river, particularly as different stakeholder communities approach an uncertain water future. “In light of urban development and climate change, Kolkata’s water is facing significant change over the coming decades,” said Tims. “It is crucial to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate an increasingly uncertain water future.” While in India, Tims also plans to teach a climate fiction writing workshop. In 2021-2022, he was Bard’s first recipient of the yearlong Henry J. Luce Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct ethnographic research on Himalayan water futures and lead a climate writing workshop in Nepal and, later, in Bangladesh. Earlier this academic year, Tims won the prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship to China. As an undergraduate at Bard, Tims also won two Critical Language Scholarships to study Bangla in Kolkata during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Read an interview with Tims about Southeast Asia's place in contemporary climate fiction here.
 
Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, has been selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. While in Spain, Ephron hopes to engage with his host community through food, sharing recipes, hosting dinner parties, and cooking together; take part in Spain’s unique and visually stunning cultural events, like flamenco performances, and Semana Santa processions; visit the hometown of the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca; and, as a queer individual, meet other queer people. “Having learned Spanish, French, and German to fluency or near-fluency, I understand that language learning requires many approaches. Some are more commonly thought of as ‘fun’ or ‘nascent’ modes of learning, while others more clearly resemble work. I hope to marry this divide, showing students that language learning is both labor and recreation; they may have to work hard, but it can be a great deal of fun, too,” said Ephron. In addition to his work as a writing tutor in the Bard Learning Commons, Ephron has received multiple awards, including the PEN America Fellowship and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Internship Scholarship.  
 
Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, has been selected as a Fulbright ETA to Mexico for the 2023–24 academic year. Tappen has studied abroad in Granada, Spain, received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training), volunteered in a local elementary school in the fall of 2022, and works as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. For Tappen, a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Mexico is an intersection of her academic interest in Mexican literature and her passion for accessible and equitable language learning. During her Fulbright year, Tappen intends to volunteer at a local community garden, a setting she found ideal for cross-cultural exchange and friendship during her time at the Bard Farm. She also hopes to learn about pre-Colombian farming practices, whose revival is currently being led by indigenous movements in Mexico seeking to confront issues presented by unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. “I’m thrilled by the opportunity to live in the country whose literature and culture have served as such positive and significant points in both my academic and personal life. During my time as an ETA in Mexico, I hope to inspire in my students the same love of language-learning I found at Bard.”
 
Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 has been selected as an ETA to Taiwan for the 2023–24 academic year. Jenks is an advanced Mandarin language speaker having attended a Chinese immersion elementary school and continuing her Mandarin language studies through high school and college, including three weeks spent in China living with host family in 2015. She has tutored students in English at Bard’s Annandale campus, as well as through the Bard Prison Initiative at both Woodbourne Correctional Facility and Eastern New York Correctional Facility. She also has worked with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement to develop curricula and provide STEM programming to local middle and high school students. “As a Fulbright ETA, I hope to equip students with the tools necessary to hone their English language and cultural skills while encouraging them to develop their own voices,” says Jenks. While in Taiwain, she plans to volunteer with the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps, which offers medical care to rural communities, or with the Taipei Medical University in a more urban setting to further engage with the community and learn more about Taiwan’s healthcare systems and settings. With her love of hiking, Jenks also hopes to explore various cultural sites including the cave temples of Lion’s Head Mountain and Fo Guang Shan monastery and enjoy the natural beauty of Taiwan.

Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright Study Research Award for 2023–24. Her project, “Gideon Klein’s Lost Works and the Legacy of Czech Musical Modernism,” aims to bring to light the early works of Czech composer and Holocaust victim Gideon Klein (1919–1945), which were lost until they were discovered in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Prague in the 1990s. She will live in Prague for the upcoming academic year and continue her research on Klein, which has been a focus of her studies at Stony Brook University, where she is pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Violin Performance.

Getzamany "Many" Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, has been selected as an ETA to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. Correa was an international student in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary. As an international student in high school, she started an initiative called English Conversation Buddies with the State Department-sponsored American Corner in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training) and worked as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. In Spain, Correa hopes to create a book club that introduces students to diverse authors writing in English, study Spanish literature, and host dinners with the locals she meets. She also plans to volunteer with EducationUSA and support students applying to colleges and universities in the U.S. “A year-long ETA in Spain will allow me to experience a culture and language central to my academic and personal interests, leverage my background in education while furthering my teaching experience, and make meaningful connections through cross-cultural engagement,” says Correa.
 
The Fulbright US 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 US 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.

Features New Work by Joyce Carol Oates, Colin Channer, Allegra Hyde, Yxta Maya Murray, Anna Badkhen, Cole Swensen, Can Xue, Frederic Tuten, and Many Others

Conjunctions:80, Ways of Water, 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. This special issue of Conjunctions explores the nature of water in our lives and those of our fellow beings. “Mundane as it may sound, what a miracle it is to drink a glass of water,” writes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow. “How rare a privilege to hike to the boggy spring of a creek or visit the silty delta of a grand river . . . Together with all animals on earth—itself largely covered by oceans—we live in, on, around, above, near, and because of water.” The issue collects 33 essays, stories, plays, and poems that converge on a central existential idea—“engage and learn the ways of water and you may flourish, but betray rivers, oceans, fjords, icebergs, water in any form, and you are ultimately betraying yourself.”
 
Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, Conjunctions:80, Ways of Water features new work by Colin Channer, Joyce Carol Oates, Allegra Hyde, Yxta Maya Murray, Anna Badkhen, Heather Altfeld, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Cole Swensen, Julia Elliott, Can Xue, Lindsey Drager, Danielle Dutton, Leila Philip, Frederic Tuten, and many others. Through fiction and poetry, ecological and climate writing, in a multitude of genres, Ways of Water brings together a wide community of writers to plumb this most essential matter so basic to the survival of all flora, all fauna on this fragile water-blue planet.
 
Additional contributors to Ways of Water include Kristin Posehn, Elizabeth Robinson, Ryan Flaherty, Susan Stewart, Jessica Campbell, Jess Arndt, Ryan Habermeyer, Sangamithra Iyer, Michael M. Weinstein, Shelley Jackson, C. Michelle Lindley, Zêdan Xelef, Quincy Troupe, Hedley Twidle, Karen Heuler, Catherine Imbriglio, Rebecca Lilly, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Bronka Nowicka.
 
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”
 
Published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions features 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 a recipient of the 2023 CLMP Capacity Building Grant. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (2022, 2023), 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).
 

Three Bard Chinese language students have been accepted to the National Collegiate Chinese Honor Society in 2023. Skye Rothstein ’24, Kelany De La Cruz ’24, and Jackie Mack MA ’25 were recommended for entry by Huiwen Li, visiting assistant professor of Chinese at Bard College and a member of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA (CLTA-USA). Rothstein, De La Cruz, and Mack were among 104 students from 20 schools across the U.S. to be accepted to the National Collegiate Chinese Honor Society, which was founded to recognize the outstanding academic achievement of college students in learning Chinese as a second language, and aims to encourage continuous learning in the language, literature, and culture. 

It is sponsored by CLTA-USA, an organization founded in 1962 and dedicated to the study of Chinese language, culture, and pedagogy. It supports the establishment and maintenance of quality Chinese programs, K-16 articulation, teacher education and professional development, and is committed to providing leadership, scholarship, and service to its members and beyond.

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Bard College Professor of Literature Hua Hsu has won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Stay True (Doubleday, 2022). The Pulitzer Prize jury called Stay True “an elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” Hsu’s Pulitzer book prize was awarded for a distinguished and factual memoir or autobiography by an American author and is accompanied by a cash award of $15,000. This year’s Pulitzer Prize recipients will constitute the 107th class of Pulitzer Prize winners. The first prizes were given in 1917 for work done in 1916. Each year, 23 prizes are awarded.

Hsu is the inaugural winner of the Pulitzer Prize’s newest book prize category for Memoir or Autobiography, which was announced as part of the 2023 competition. Previously, memoirs and autobiographies were submitted and judged in the Biography category. “Memoirs and autobiographies are flourishing,” said Marjorie Miller, administrator of the prizes. “After years of considering them alongside distinguished biographies and other nonfiction, and, at the urging of some nominating jurors, the Pulitzer Board felt it was time for each genre to have its own prize category.” The Pulitzer Prizes for books are awarded annually to work in Fiction, U.S. History, Biography, Memoir or Autobiography, Poetry and Nonfiction first published in the United States during preceding calendar year.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (September 2022), which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is a contributor to CBS News’s Sunday Morning; serves on the governance board of Critical Minded, a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and serves as judge for various literary competitions and fellowships, including the PEN America Literary Awards, Rona Jaffe Fellowship, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2018 (New Yorker); was a finalist for the James Beard Award for Food Writing in 2013 (for “Wokking the Suburbs,” Lucky Peach); and his work has been anthologized in Best Music Writing (2010 and 2012) and Best African American Essays 2010. Hsu previously wrote for Artforum, The Atlantic, Grantland, Slate, and The Wire; his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He previously taught at Vassar College and was formerly a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Professor Hsu’s research and academic interests include Asian American studies, transpacific studies, critical ethnic studies, popular culture and subculture, and literary nonfiction. He received his BA for the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD from Harvard University. He has taught at Bard since 2022.

In “An Archaeology of the Air,” recently published in issue three of The European Review of Books, Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon traces the quest of English poet and historiographer Robert Manning, in the 1330s, to find written records of the widely told legend of a Danish king named Havelok, his royal English wife Goldeburgh, and a fisherman named Gryme (Grim) who founded the port town along the North Sea coast in England, now called Grimsby, which today is the site of the world’s largest offshore wind farm. Although Manning found nothing in terms of texts, Havelok’s story was “too diffuse for Manning to capture, but too ubiquitous for him to ignore.” 

“For Manning, the air was the archive,” Libbon writes. “Fossils are preserved in layers; bodies and treasure and other time capsules are covered over with earth . . . Yet the air, as Manning saw it, was circulating, transmitting, carrying hearsay and history . . . what if, like Manning, we excavated the atmosphere? What might an archaeology of the air look like?” 

Through this “archaeology of the air,” Libbon’s essay examines Havelok the Dane, the oldest surviving manuscript about Havelok and Grim—which was written in rhymed couplets circa 1300 by an unknown author in a North East Midlands dialect of Middle English—and explores the historical evolution of the characters’ and region’s narrative and technological relationship to the wind’s power. “The ground preserves objects as they were in their own time. The air preserves artifacts in transit. Carried from place to place, era to era; always in the process of becoming, of changing,” she writes.

Three Bard College alumni/ae—Beatrice Abbott ’15, Megumi Kivuva ’22, and Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21—have been awarded competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2023 award year. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States” and “seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans” through selection, recognition, and financial support of individuals who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Beatrice Abbott ’15, who majored in political studies at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of social sciences. She is a master’s student in geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include evidence/forensics, critical migration studies, critical cartography and geographic information systems (GIS), and visual culture.

Megumi Kivuva ’22, who majored in Spanish studies and computer science with a concentration in Experimental Humanities at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of STEM education and learning research. Kivuva is a PhD student in computing education at the University of Washington. Their research “aims to broaden participation in computing education for Black and refugee students,” and they “use community participatory research to understand the barriers to accessing computing education and codesign interventions to make computing education more accessible to these communities.”
 
Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21, who majored in mathematics at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of mathematical biology. He is a PhD student in mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont. The fellowship will allow him to focus on his research project, "Decoding Parallel Processing in the Brain using the Connectome Eigenfunctions." 

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The five-year fellowship period provides a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. Each year, the NSF receives more than 12,000 applications to the GRFP program, which has awarded fellowships to its selected scholars since 1952.