News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Six Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US 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. This cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 90 countries and represents more than 500 US colleges and universities.

Biology major Yadriel Lagunes ’25, from Clifton, New Jersey, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. At Bard, he serves as a Residential Life Peer Counselor and a supervisor on the Bard EMT Squad. “This scholarship has made studying abroad a possibility for me,” says Lagunes. “I want to center global public health in my future career as a healthcare worker and researcher. Through travel, I hope foster cultural sensitivity and communication skills that are desperately needed in my field. I am so grateful for Gilman scholarship for this opportunity.”

French and Anthropology double major Lyra Cauley ’25, from Blue Hill, Maine, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at the Center for University Programs Abroad (CUPA) in Paris, France via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I would like to thank the Gilman scholarship for giving me financial security and freedom abroad. This scholarship allows me to fully embrace the experience of learning and living abroad with financial worry or strain,” says Cauley.

Biology major Angel Ramirez ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, The Netherlands via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I’m very grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman scholarship,” says Ramirez. “It’s a huge opportunity to be able to pursue my goals within biology for my future in STEM. I’m excited to learn a new language abroad in the Netherlands and experience new cultures without a financial barrier. I proudly come from a family of Mexican immigrants; therefore, I feel empowered that people like me are able to partake in a change as great as this one.”

Spanish and Written Arts joint major Lisbet Jackson ’25, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I am incredibly grateful to the Gilman Scholarship for supporting my semester in Ecuador and ensuring I can commit to developing my Spanish, studying literature, and immersing myself in Ecuadorian culture. Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship I will also be more prepared to pursue a career in multilingual and global education,” says Jackson.

Sociology major Jennifer Woo ’25, from Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany for spring 2024. “To be awarded this scholarship means to fully explore and pursue my dream of studying abroad with the freedom of having the financial support I hoped for,” says Woo. “My dad is an artist who has always pushed me to travel and search for culture, the arts, and new experiences, so being able to fulfill this dream while having the resources of education means the world to me.”

German Studies major David Taylor-Demeter ’25, from Budapest, Hungary, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “To combine my studies of German language and literature with a day-to-day experience of Berlin is an invaluable opportunity,” says Taylor-Demeter.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.
 
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 US 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.

Program Provides Support for International Artists Under Threat Due to Their Work

Bard College and PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) are delighted to announce the inaugural cohort of fellows for the Center for Ethics and Writing Program, comprising five international artists who have been persecuted for their work. The fellows encompass a range of backgrounds and artistic disciplines.

The Fellows for the Center for Ethics and Writing Program are poet and artist Amaury Pacheco del Monte; writer, human rights activist, and physicist Asli Erdogan; Tamil poet, filmmaker, and actor Leena Manimekalai; Ugandan human rights advocate, poet, and medical anthropologist Stella Nyanzi; and Iranian poet, lyricist, and women’s rights activist Mahtab Yaghma.

This fellowship is a non-residency program providing direct support for one year to writers and artists whose free expression is threatened due to their socially engaged art. The Center hopes to further empower the fellows by inviting them to speak on their creative practice in virtual courses, networking extensively on their behalf, and promoting their work on the Center’s website and online journal.

“The Center for Ethics and Writing’s partnership with Pen America’s ARC is the next step in the Center’s efforts to highlight the critical and urgent role artists and writers play in shaping our political and cultural discourse. Our first cohort of fellows embody the Center’s commitment to supporting creative practices that despite the risks, engage boldly with some of the most pressing and divisive social issues facing us,” said John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities Dinaw Mengestu, director of Bard College’s Written Arts program and the Center for Ethics and Writing.
 
“ARC is honored to collaborate with Bard College to identify a talented pool of writers and artists who demonstrate an unwavering commitment to their freedom of expression. We are thrilled to amplify these writers and artists who will lend their expertise and experience to the Center for Ethics and Writing,” said ARC Director Julie Trébault. “By centering creatives who have fled their own country for the sake of their free expression, Bard recognizes the vital role creatives play in advancing the international exchange of thoughts and ideas and the necessity to create such an empowering program.”

The Fellowship for the Center of Ethics and Writing Program is made possible by generous support from the Booth Ferris Foundation.

Forbes magazine reports that the number of students enrolled in Korean language classes at US colleges and universities grew from 8,449 students in 2009 to 20,000 in 2021. The motivating force behind this shift is The Hallyu, or Korean Wave, in which global popularity of South Korean pop culture and entertainment has surged, as evidenced in the appeal of K-Pop music, Korean TV shows like Squid Game, and films like Parasite in America. Soonyoung Lee, visiting assistant professor of Korean literature, language, and culture at Bard College, has noticed the demographic in her Korean film and language classes changing away from a majority of Asian and Asian American students. “The enthusiasm for Korean pop culture has transcended ethnic boundaries, drawing in a diverse cohort of students. They are not just seeking to learn a language; they are immersing themselves in a cultural phenomenon that resonates with them on multiple levels,” said Lee.

The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13. “For all its abstraction and timelessness — what is more ageless than the opera’s themes of love and beauty? — this work is absolutely of its time, slowing down emotion in a world that moves uncontrollably fast,” writes Joshua Barone. “The premiere run, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May, was just a single evening, but Stranger Love deserves a life far beyond that.”

See the Best Classical Music Performances of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Stranger Love

Bard College is pleased to announce that Marina van Zuylen, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard, has been named the first Clemente Chair in the Humanities. This new Chair is funded by a generous gift from two of Clemente’s long-time supporters, John and Marlene Childs.

“Bard has been Clemente’s key strategic partner for decades, providing college credits for Clemente students around the country,” said James S. Shorris, Board President of The Clemente Course. “Historically, this critical partnership has been overseen by Clemente’s National Academic Director, Professor Marina van Zuylen, in a pro bono role,” said Shorris. “We are thrilled that Prof. van Zuylen has been named the first holder of this esteemed chair, and are deeply grateful to the Childs family for their tremendous support for Clemente, and to Bard College for their enduring support and partnership.”

"My Clemente students often tell me that literature and philosophy have become their lifeline. One student, after reading Virginia Woolf, wrote in her final paper that sitting around our Clemente seminar table in the Kingston public library was her version of having a room of her own, where she finally had the mental freedom to think and imagine different worlds and new possibilities,” said van Zuylen. “Witnessing how our students gain confidence through the sheer joy of sharing their opinions, being listened to, and then processing what they have discovered, continues to be an unparalleled experience."

"I can think of no better inaugural Clemente chair that Marina van Zuylen, said Jonathan Becker, Bard’s vice president for academic affairs. “Marina is a dedicated teacher, a brilliant writer and researcher, and has demonstrated time and again her commitment to the Clemente mission of bringing rigorous liberal arts and sciences education to adults facing adverse circumstances."

About Marina van Zuylen
Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She was educated in France before receiving a BA in Russian literature and a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle, Monomania: Living Life as Art, The Plenitude of Distraction, and Éloge des vertus minuscules. She has published in praise of some of the most beleaguered maladies of modernity—boredom, fatigue, idleness, mediocrity—and written about snobbery, dissociative disorders, and obsessive compulsive aesthetics. She has published extensively on the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière and has written about art and aesthetics for MoMA and other art-related venues. She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the university of Paris VII. She is the national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities (clemente.bard.edu), a free college course for underserved adults, and accepted on its behalf a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2014. AB, MA, PhD, Harvard University. At Bard since 1997.

About The Clemente Course in The Humanities
The Clemente Course in the Humanities provides a transformative educational experience for adults facing economic hardship in adverse circumstances. These free college humanities courses empower students to further their education and careers, to become effective advocates for themselves and their families, and engage actively in the cultural and civic lives of their communities.

The Clemente Course in the Humanities is founded on the conviction that studying the humanities enables individuals who face barriers to economic and social opportunities to develop critical, reflective and creative skills that empower them to improve their own lives and those of their families and communities.

Clemente’s seasoned professors provide a rigorous education in literature, philosophy, history, art history, and critical thinking and writing. Students do not need to have a high school diploma or GED to be admitted to study. Rooted in Clemente’s commitment to access, tuition is always free, as is the cost of books, childcare, and transportation.

Courses are accredited by higher educational institutions, primarily Clemente’s longstanding partner, Bard College. For many Clemente alumni, these college credits mark the first step toward receiving a college degree. For all students, whether they choose to pursue additional formal education or not, Clemente aims to increase civic literacy, participation, and advocacy.

Clemente has expanded substantially since its first courses more than twenty-five years ago, conceived by its visionary founder Earl Shorris. Clemente now encompasses over twenty-five courses around the country, has been honored with a National Humanities Medal, and received prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other leading bodies. The Clemente National Board (CCH) is an indispensable resource for each Clemente course nationwide, providing assistance with student recruitment, curriculum development, staff and faculty hiring, course accreditation, grant-writing, and faculty training development.

Dina A. Ramadan, continuing associate professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College, has received a 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the category of Short-Form Writing. One of 27 grantees, professor Ramadan will write a series of articles on the relation of contemporary art to migration from the Middle East and North Africa. The articles will approach art criticism as a decolonial strategy that counters neutralizing practices of inclusion and representation. The Arts Writers Grant program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts.

In its 2023 cycle the Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $935,000 to 27 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in three categories—Articles, Books, and Short-Form Writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.

“The grants uplift the diverse perspectives of writers whose fine-tuned attention to the content and context of contemporary art-making helps to keep artists at the center of cultural conversations and debates—where they belong,” said Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Further reading:
Ali Cherri Interviewed by Dina A. Ramadan in BOMB Magazine
What Is the Cost of Inclusion? Dina Ramadan Reviews Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers

Conjunctions:81, Numina Features New Work by Julia Alvarez, Aimee Bender, Arthur Sze, Shane McCrae, Kyoko Mori, Han Ong, James Morrow, Amparo Dávila, and Many Others

Conjunctions:81, Numina, 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 issue of Conjunctions explores enchantment. “In a world rife with disenchantment, gathering works that explore enchantment might seem contrarian to some, but to us it felt natural, even imperative,” writes Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow. “Words like numinous and enchanted are—wonderfully—open to a variety of interpretations. And so the writers in this issue had an even greater than usual role in defining its direction, its atmosphere, its very meaning.” The issue collects 30 essays, stories, and poems that converge on enchantment—“Think of this issue as a literary murmuration,” Morrow continues. “A kind of word ballet whose constantly shifting images spark the imaginations of all who encounter it.”
 
Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Morrow, Conjunctions:81, Numina features new work by Julia Alvarez, Aimee Bender, Arthur Sze, Shane McCrae, Kyoko Mori, Han Ong, James Morrow, Amparo Dávila, and many others. Through fiction and poetry, drawings, and beguiling writings in a multitude of genres, Numina brings together a wide community of writers who invite readers to view their world anew, transfigured just a little. Or maybe a lot.
 
Additional contributors to Numina include Alyssa Pelish, Meredith Stricker, Bronka Nowicka, Mark Irwin, Melissa Pritchard, Laird Hunt, Jessica Reed, Nathaniel Mackey, Martha Ronk, Cristina Campo, Andrew Ervin, Brian Conn, Heather Altfeld, Eliot Weinberger, Laynie Browne, Edie Meidav, Nancy Kuhl and Karla Kelsey, Nina Shope, Michael Ives, Madeline Kearin, Ben Tufnell, and Brian Evenson.

The Washington Post hails Conjunctions as “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, 2022), 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).

In her essay “Forget Your Darlings,” published in the European Review of Books, Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Literature Program Marisa Libbon explores the ways in which “three recent books about the lives of medieval women—one fictional, the others real—experiment with biographical form, and in doing so, challenge their readers to remember differently.” In her analysis of Charlotte Cooper-Davis’s Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy, Janina Ramirez’s Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, and Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Libbon reveals how the complexity and agency of women’s lives and work during the Middle Ages have been scarcely memorialized or documented—and in some cases, textually erased—since that era. “It’s only in the historical narrative, our memory of the past, that women are absent,” Libbon writes. “Today, and historically, these absences leave room for false narratives to take root about what were and are ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ roles for women.”

For Sarah Elia ’06, Bard College alumna and an English as a New Language teacher at Saugerties Central School District, using news resources has been an invaluable part of teaching her students about language and culture. For the New York Times, Elia writes about four methods that she has used in her classroom for bringing a global perspective to language studies. Using reporting from the Times, she has had her students give public presentations that draw on varied viewpoints, engage in bilingual discussions of articles, use Venn diagrams to compare cultures, and include news images to illustrate culture-themed art projects. “Presenting their work to audiences throughout the school has boosted my students’ confidence and given them a greater presence in the school community,” Elia writes for the Times. “It also has given listeners the chance to learn from and engage with their international peers in contexts that are connected to the curriculum.”

 

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance, a new book by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, was reviewed in The Christian Century. The book explores not only how the Italian Renaissance came to life, but also how Sandro Botticelli’s art helped bring it about and why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today. “The secret at stake here is a set of drawings made by Sandro Botticelli for a Medici patron in late 15th-century Florence—a commission meant to illustrate all 100 cantos of Dante’s intensely Christian early 14th-century Commedia,” writes Peter S. Hawkins for The Christian Century. “What a Renaissance artist made of a quintessentially medieval text brings Luzzi to ponder all that was entailed in the seismic cultural rebirth that took place in Florence 500 years ago and has been reinterpreted again and again across the reaches of the Western world.”
 

Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022). Khalid’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2024 semester, during which time he will continue his writing and meet informally with students. Khalid will give a public reading at Bard during his residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another. First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail. Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West. And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.”

“I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.” 

Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. The 2023 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Violet Kupersmith for her novel, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House 2021).

Bard College’s Clemente Course, a college-level introduction to the humanities taught by Marina Van Zuylen, Clemente Chair in the Humanities at Bard College and national academic director of Clemente, was featured in the Times Union. “Some students who take the Clemente Course continue their higher education—many have received full scholarships to enroll at Bard College—while others have started businesses, nonprofit organizations or have run for office,” writes Maria M. Silva for Times Union. The program, which will run from October 5 until January 26 via Zoom and in person in Kingston, offers free, accredited humanities courses to economically and educationally disadvantaged adults who will learn about US history, writing, literature, philosophy, and art history through class discussions, readings, and written assignments. Students who complete the course earn six college credits from Bard that can be transferred to any institution of higher education. “These professors teach right under these banners that read ‘education is a human right’ and that dictates the way they approached us,” Michael Atkin, one of Clemente’s most recent graduates, told Silva. “I went in with very high hopes and in fact, I couldn’t have even imagined how great it would be.”

On Friday, September 22, Bard College is hosting After Chinua Achebe: African Writing and the Future, an event honoring the memory of the late Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), former Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature. 

A symposium in the afternoon in the Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center will examine the current flowering of writing by African authors, in Africa and in the diaspora. The symposium will be followed by the dedication of a room in the Stevenson Library at Bard in memory of Achebe. 

The event will begin at 2:00 pm on Friday, September 22, with a dance performance by Souleymane Badolo celebrating the life of Achebe, followed by an opening address by President Leon Botstein. There will be two panel discussions, Writing Beyond Africa: The African imagination in the diaspora at 2:30 pm, and Activism and the Word: Writing, speech and song in African political culture at 4 pm. Confirmed panelists include the novelists Nuruddin Farah, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu and Fatin Abbas, and the musician and activist DJ Switch. 

The event is sponsored by President's Office, the Hannah Arendt Center, the Stevenson Library, Africana Studies, and the Offices of the Dean and Alumni/ae Affairs. Members of the Achebe family will be in attendance, and the event is free and open to the public.

Bard College thanks Penguin Press and Penguin Classics for their support by providing copies of The African Trilogy.
 
Chinua Achebe was a groundbreaking Nigerian writer best known for his first and most influential novel, Things Fall Apart. He wrote numerous other books, including works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and children's books. Professor Achebe received more than 30 honorary degrees, as well as many awards for his work. From 1990 to 2009 he was the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. 

“The idea of writing remains quite poignant to students, but we often think of it as this very private, creative act,” said Dinaw Mengestu, director of the Center for Ethics and Writing, director of the Written Arts Program, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities, on WAMC’s The Best of Our Knowledge. “In doing so, we fail to make the argument for writing as more than just a personal, creative act, but as something that can be responsive to the world around us.” By engaging students with challenging texts and tasking them with considering the role language plays in shaping the world, Mengestu says the Center is already attracting students who might not have taken a writing course previously. “It becomes less about an elite, privileged discourse, and more about something that students from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds find that they can actually engage with,” Mengestu said.

Violet Kupersmith, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, September 18. The reading begins at 6:30 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. This event is free and open to the public. For more information call 845-758-7087. 

Kupersmith has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House 2021). Kupersmith is in residence at Bard College for the fall 2023 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. 
“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 is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a two-year, $300,000 grant by the Booth Ferris Foundation to support the establishment of the Center for Ethics and Writing. The center, directed by Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program, reimagines the study of literature and writing as both an academic and social practice, one that asks students to translate the skills they develop in the classroom as critical readers and writers to some of the most pressing and divisive social issues of the moment. Center-supported courses and events prioritize the complexity of public discourse and the important role language plays in shaping it. The center aims to address the deterioration of civic dialogue, which has been under increasing threat in recent years from a growing intolerance of opposing viewpoints and widening gaps in experiences along racial, ethnic, and economic lines.
 
"The Booth Ferris Foundation’s incredibly generous support allows us to play a critical role in developing and modeling a creative and critical practice that engages with some of the most pressing issues of the moment,” said Mengestu. “With this grant, the center is able to extend Bard’s history of innovative teaching into classrooms across New York while also supporting artists whose freedom of expression is under threat."

The Center for Ethics and Writing engages in many activities, including developing an interdisciplinary approach to teaching ethics and writing that empowers students to develop narratives that reflect the experiences and concerns of their communities; partnering with local and national nonprofit organizations, including PEN America, to provide students opportunities to produce publishable narratives on social justice topics; promoting the values of free expression through a fellows program that brings in international, at-risk writers and artists; offering multi-day micro-workshops with artists and activists on topics related to current course offerings; providing training for community college faculty; and developing digital platforms including an online journal and podcast series.
 
In its first year, the center will provide an impressive array of programs. It has offered courses such as Writing While Black, Writing as Resistance, and Risk and the Art of Poetry and has hosted four micro-workshops by writer and activist Yasmin El-Rifae; Dana Bishop-Root, the director of education and public programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art; Fahima Ife, poet and associate professor of ethnic and critical race studies at UC Santa Cruz; and Emily Raboteau, writer, critic, and Professor at CUNY. In partnership with PEN America’s Artist at Risk Connection, an inaugural cohort of international fellows will begin this fall. Participating fellows’ freedom of expression is under threat due to their creative practices. Their work will be published alongside writing produced through center-supported courses in the center’s online journal, to be launched later this fall. The center is also partnering with Bard Microcolleges in Harlem and Brooklyn, and the Bard Prison Initiative, to develop courses that empower students to express their cultural and gendered experiences.
 
The Booth Ferris Foundation was established in 1957 under the wills of Willis H. Booth and his wife, Chancie Ferris Booth. The Foundation funds a variety of nonprofit organizations in the areas of arts and culture, K-12 and higher education, and parks and outdoor spaces.

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund his project Plato and the Tyrant: The Experiment that Wrecked a City and Shaped a Philosophic Masterpiece.  The book will use Plato’s little-known letters to illuminate his interventions in the politics of the Greek city of Syracuse and his relationship to the ruler Dionysius the Younger. The grant will support his work over a 10-month term beginning in September. Romm was previously a recipient for the NEH Public Scholar grant in 2018 for work on The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers in the Last Days of Greek Freedom, a book about the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes.

“The Public Scholar program helps situate the humanities just where they ought to be—in the large world of public discourse, rather than behind university walls,” Prof. Romm said.  “I’m honored to be recognized for making the ancient Greeks a part of that discourse. Never have the lessons they taught about tyranny, rule of law, and the meaning of citizenship been more relevant to our lives than they are at this moment.”

Plato is regarded as one of the world’s most influential thinkers, yet his life and personality remain opaque, partially because he did not include himself in his dialogues but used the mask of Socrates to develop his ideas. Plato and the Tyrant will bring his first-person voice to the forefront through quotes from the Platonic letters, documents sometimes regarded as forgeries but, as the book will argue, almost certainly genuine writings of Plato. The five Syracusan letters, addressed by Plato to Dionysius or to other political leaders of Syacuse, help tell the story of Plato’s interventions in that city.  In addition, large segments of the Republic, especially the doctrine of the philosopher-king, can best be understood as reflections of Plato’s encounters with Dionysius, the foremost autocrat in the Greek world of his day. 

Plato and the Tyrant follows not only the final two decades of Plato's life (367-347 BC) but the rise and fall, during that period, of a ruler who was at times Plato's student and at other times his nemesis, Dionysius the Younger, who at age 30 came to power in Syracuse in 367 as the sheltered heir of his father, also named Dionysius. The uncle of the younger Dionysius, Dion—a zealous adherent, and possibly lover, of Plato— wished to reshape his nephew’s character through philosophic instruction in the hope of setting Syracuse's regime on a healthier path. At Dion's urging, Plato journeyed to Syracuse just after the Younger's accession, a visit that set in motion a series of disasters for Dion, Dionysius, Plato, and the entire city. Plato and the Tyrant will ultimately examine the question of Plato's relationship to autocracy, a question that resonates strongly with current concerns in global and domestic politics.

Distinguished Visiting Writer Masha Gessen was awarded the 2023 Prize for Political Thought by the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking, calling them “one of the most courageous chroniclers of our time.” The award, founded in 1994 and awarded by an international jury, comes with a cash prize of €10,000. “Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom,” the committee said in a statement. “With books as well as essays in the New Yorker and a strong public presence, Gessen opens up new perspectives that help to understand a world in accelerated change.”

In his new memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, poet Shane McCrae explores the rupture that resulted from being taken at age 3 from his Black father by his white grandparents, writes Wyatt Mason, Bard College writer in residence, for the New York Times. “The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” McCrae told Mason, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.” The narrative McCrae unfolds as he tries to piece together the truth of his past winds across American landscapes, the inner world of his childhood experiences, the emotional and physical abuse he suffered, and finding his father again as a teenager. McCrae’s book “is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity,” writes Mason. He adds, “The memoir accumulates a hugeness of feeling that puts a lie to the idea that difficulty in a piece of writing is necessarily cold or aloof or incompatible with the kind of intense emotion that McCrae’s narrative uncommonly yields.”

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.

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.

For the Guardian, Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard, writes about the recent shooting incidents in Missouri and upstate New York, where innocent young people were shot by homeowners for the simple mistake of knocking on the wrong door or pulling into the wrong driveway. Prose acknowledges that as Americans, compared to just a decade and a half ago, an “uptick in impulsive, explosive, trigger-happy rage ramps up the fear and paranoia that has us warily eyeing our fellow passengers and shoppers”—and asks, “So how do we change the belief that it’s a good idea to shoot first and ask questions later? How do we repair this broken chromosome in our nation’s cowboy DNA?”

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Bard Written Arts alumna and journalist Moira Donegan ’12 cautions that we should not be fooled by the highest court’s decision to allow the abortion drug mifepristone to remain available—temporarily staying a Texas federal judge’s ruling to reverse the drug’s FDA approval and pull it from US markets—while the case goes through an appeals process. Donegan deduces “sharp intra-Republican disagreement over how to handle the unexpectedly virulent political fallout from the Dobbs decision” among the right-wing Supreme Court justices who jointly ruled to overturn abortion access as a federal right. She asserts the ideologues want to “hit the gas” while the institutionalists want to “pump the brakes,” but that doesn’t change where they are all headed. “Do not let the mifepristone ruling fool you about where this extremist court is going,” she writes. 

While the nation waited for the Supreme Court to issue its order on mifepristone, the past week served as a stark realization of “just how far the Overton window has shifted, and just how low the standards for women’s health and freedom have sunk, in the months since Dobbs.” She notes that “developments that could only have been fairly understood as grave insults to women’s dignity were instead pitched as mercies or signs of moderation.”

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the recipients of its book awards for 2022. Bard Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s Stay True: A Memoir won the award for autobiography. NBCC Committee Chair Heather Scott Partington called Hsu’s account of a college-age friendship a “clear-eyed and vulnerable exploration of platonic friendship and lifelong loss” that “demonstrates how earnest teens seek to define themselves in dichotomies, and how it’s our routines that create our identities.” One of the most prestigious of literary honors in the United States, the NBCC awards are selected annually by a committee of book critics and review editors. The awards recognize works published the prior year and are open to books published in English in the United States.

Acclaimed novelist and Bard writer in residence Mona Simpson this week published her seventh novel, Commitment (Knopf). A “minimalist masterpiece” (Ann Levin, Associated Press) the novel follows a California family in the 1970s and 1980s whose three siblings must learn to navigate their lives after their mother is institutionalized for severe depression. “Simpson is an artist of the family saga, the multigenerational narrative. In her seventh novel, she doesn’t revisit this territory so much as animate it anew.” (Kirkus) Commitment is one of Kirkus’s 20 Best Books to Read in March.

The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking’s (IWT) upcoming April Conference, "Crafting, Composing, Conversing: The Writer’s Voice Reconsidered," will focus on the teaching practices that help students to develop their writerly voices. This conference will welcome educators of all disciplines to Bard College's Annandale campus on Friday, April 28, 2023, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Speaker Peter Elbow, the author of the bestselling books Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, will deliver the keynote address. The conference offers an online attendance option for those who are unable to join in person at Annandale. Standard Tuition is $575, Early-Bird Tuition is $500, and Early-Bird Group Tuition is $450. Register by March 28 to qualify for discounted rates. A group is three or more teachers from the same institution. Scholarship applications are available. To learn more and register, go to: iwt.bard.edu. 

The 2023 April conference focuses on IWT writing-based teaching practices rooted in the interplay of written and spoken voices to explore voice as concept, craft, and conversation. Voice, according to Peter Elbow, has become a “warm fuzzy word” that people use to describe writing they like or that does something appealing they can’t quite pinpoint. “We’re in trouble if we don’t know what we mean by the term,” he adds.  

In small workshop groups, participants will work toward a clear, nuanced, and practical understanding of voice. Our work will also consider challenges and dilemmas: how can hesitant writers or students writing in a second language tap into voice? Can a strong voice get in the way of an essay’s substance or argument? How do we honor and create space for our students’ diverse voices, both spoken and written? Working together, we will aim to identify clear and transparent language that can help our students recognize, develop, and experiment with voice in their writing. 

About Keynote Speaker Peter Elbow
Peter Elbow is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been extremely influential in the field of Composition Studies, having authored Writing with Power and other books that have transformed how writing is taught. He also played an instrumental role in the founding of Bard IWT, and the institute is honored to welcome him back. 

Elbow has been a Director of Writing Programs for over ten years, first at Stony Brook University and then at UMass Amherst. He was on the founding faculty at two experimental colleges, Franconia College in New Hampshire and Evergreen State College in Washington State—precursors to today's movements towards interdisciplinary teaching. 

Nuruddin Farah, distinguished professor of literature at Bard College, was interviewed in the Financial Times, where he spoke about his ambiguous relationship with his homeland as a Somali novelist who has lived in exile, his identity as a radical secularist, and his refusal to tolerate intolerance. “Like many people forced to live in exile, Farah has a complex relationship with his homeland,” writes David Pilling for the Financial Times. “A liberal who abhors the radical Islam that has overwhelmed his country, a fierce individualist who detests the conformity imposed by many families, Farah is a man who has lived in 13 countries but who can only think about one: Somalia.” Farah, who has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and whose works have been translated into more than 20 languages, spoke of the transformative power of books to take on a direction and life of their own in the literary sphere. “The books are continuing their dialogue through the writing with other books,” he said. “And the reader is the person who finds out which books they’re in dialogue with.”

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, has been awarded with the rank of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak on behalf of France. “It gives me great pleasure to hereby highlight your dedication in the service of culture, which holds such a special place in French people’s hearts,” wrote Malak. One of the primary distinctions from the four ministerial orders of the French Republic, this award is bestowed upon those who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the cultural spheres, or by their support for the distribution of knowledge and works that form the wealth of French cultural heritage. 
  
Daniel Mendelsohn 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 Order of Arts and Letters (L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) was established in 1957 by the French Minister of Culture to reward individuals who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the arts or literature or by the contribution they have made to the influence of arts and letters in France and worldwide. It consists of three ranks: Knight (Chevalier), Officer (Officier), and the highest honor, Commander (Commandeur). 

One of the most stunning aspects of writer and editor Richard Gottlieb’s career is the enormous number of books he has edited on a wide spectrum of subjects, writes James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, for Current. The sheer range in content that Gottlieb has edited—in some six or seven hundred books—speaks to a rare freedom that few book reviewers are allowed. “Most of us have a ‘beat,’ a subject with which we’re deeply familiar and on which we may have published books of our own,” Romm writes. “We’re called upon by an editor who has us on his or her list of those who can cover that beat.” In his view, this practice leaves little room for reviewers to explore new interests and evaluate works outside of the subjects they are traditionally assigned, resulting in the literary world largely lacking the perspectives of offbeat enthusiasts. “Rather than maintain lists of experts who cover specific beats,” he writes, “Perhaps we’d be better served if editors kept lists of writers who, like Gottlieb, can be interested in anything.”

Assistant Professor of Written Arts and National Book Award finalist Jenny Xie has been selected as a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in literature. Xie received one of 54 fellowships awarded to early-career artists based in Minnesota and New York City. Eight fellows each were selected in the fields of dance; film, video and digital production; literature; music; theater, performance and spoken word; and visual arts, and three in each of the newly added fields of technology centered arts and combined artistic fields. Xie will receive $50,000 over two years ($25,000 per year) in direct support to create new work, advance artistic goals, and/or promote professional development.

Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an assistant professor of written arts at Bard College.

“I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity,” she writes.

Field-specific panels, composed of artists, curators, artistic leaders and arts administrators, reviewed a total of 702 applicants before identifying 129 as finalists for fuller discussion in advance of recommending a slate of fellows to the Jerome Board of Directors for approval. In their deliberations, panels considered applicants’ past works, artistic accomplishments, the potential impact of a fellowship on their careers and their artistic field, and their alignment with Jerome’s values of diversity, innovation and risk, and humility. This year’s cohort exemplifies Jerome Foundation’s commitment to diversity and the diversity of artists across all fields with 82% of the fellows identifying as Black, Native American, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or Arab American or as multi-racial or multi-ethnic.

Fellows are also offered one-on-one coaching and peer gathering opportunities through the MAP Fund’s Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) program, designed to help artists individually and collectively consider, invent and co-devise solutions tailored to their specific practice and aesthetic ambitions.