News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Lucky Red (Dial Press, 2023), the new novel by Bard alumna Claudia Cravens ’08, is among a cohort of new fiction that is reexamining the Western, writes the New York Times. For Cravens, the trope of the “mysterious stranger” was irresistible while drafting the novel. “I love that archetype,” Cravens said to the Times, “but I thought, ‘what if the stranger Bridget falls in love with is a woman instead of a man?’”‌ Other contemporaries of Cravens are bringing more racial diversity to the genre, including those exploring old archetypes with an Indigenous perspective. For Cravens, “playing with the genre and the mythic space” brought new life to her love of the Western, but perhaps another genre is on the horizon. Recently, she’s been “reading a lot about forests and monsters and mysteries.” “I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes me,” Cravens said.

While drafting Commitment, Writer in Residence Mona Simpson asked herself what it might be like to imagine a mental health system that would’ve made life “gentler” for her own mother. Commitment follows Diane, a single mother, and her children, tracing the ways that mental illness affects not only Diane, but the entire family structure—something Simpson says rings true to her experience. “It just travels through the family,” Simpson says. “We do share the burdens and the exhilarations of the people we’re closest to.” For Simpson, writing the novel was an exercise in imagining what life might be like for someone like her mother if the system were slightly different, or if luck had been more on her side. “I guess this book started out being set right at the point where the mental health hospitals were beginning to empty out,” she says. “So it was a little bit of a ‘what if.’”

The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College will hold its 2023 July weeklong workshops from Sunday, July 9, through Friday, July 14. The workshops are designed to help teachers deepen their understanding of writing-based teaching, its theory and practices, and its application in the classroom. Register by Friday, June 9, to take advantage of early bird discounted rates.

Each workshop focuses on a particular form of writing—the essay, academic paper, creative nonfiction—or on writing-based teaching in a particular subject area, such as history, science and math, or grammar.
 
The workshops offer a retreat in which participants learn new writing practices, read diverse texts, and collaborate with teachers from around the world on Bard’s campus. The luxury of time helps participants explore how to adopt these new practices by adapting writing prompts, accommodating collaborative learning in larger classes, and incorporating new readings. Attendees will also explore how different forms—such as poetry—might inspire students from diverse backgrounds.
 
To learn about all of the workshops offered this summer and register, visit: https://iwt.bard.edu/july/

Standard Rate: $3,000
Group Rate: $2,700
Commuter Rate: $2,700

Early-Bird Rate: $2,500                         
Early-Bird Group Rate: $2,250
Early-Bird Commuter Rate: $2,200
The deadline for registering for Early-Bird discounted rates is June 9, 2023.

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright-in-residence at Bard College, has been awarded three residencies to support the development of their professional works.

Mubashshir has received a Bau Institute Art Residency Award, hosted by the Camargo Foundation at its Cassis campus in France, a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Catwalk Art Residency for fall 2023 at the Catwalk Institute, Catskill.

The BAU residency will enable Daaimah to continue their work on the libretto and book of Emily Black, a bluesy-rock musical about a Black domestic worker in NYC. Emily Black also received a Fisher Center LAB Commission and Residency in the spring of 2022. The MacDowell residency will support their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. The Catwalk Art Residency will support the beginning of a new work of creative nonfiction.

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Alma Guillermoprieto as distinguished visiting professor in the Division of Languages and Literature for the fall 2023 semester. 

Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican reporter and writer, began her English-language career in journalism in 1978, and broke the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the army in El Salvador. She has written extensively about Latin America, including for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and National Geographic Magazine, and her writings have been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world. She has published eight books in both English and Spanish, including The Heart That Bleeds, and Looking for History. 

Guillermoprieto is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a George Polk Award, and an International Womens’ Media Foundation lifetime achievement award, among many others. In 2018 she was the recipient of Spain’s Princess Asturias Award in the Humanities. 

Guillermoprieto began teaching at the age of 20, when, on the recommendation of Merce Cunningham, she traveled to Cuba to teach Cunningham and Graham dance techniques, which she recounts in her memoir Dancing with Cuba: a Memoir of the Revolution. In 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez, she taught the inaugural journalism workshop at the Foundation for New Journalism, in Cartagena, Colombia, and taught the first workshop of the year there through 2010. She has been a visiting professor in both Latin American history and journalism, at Chicago University, Harvard, USC-Berkeley, and Princeton.