News from the Division of Languages and Literature

The Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), developed in partnership with PEN America and Bard College, was covered in Nieman Reports. RIMA, launched by Masha Gessen with the support of Edwin Barbey Charitable Trust, advised by PEN America trustee Peter Barbey, aims to digitally preserve decades of independent Russian journalism that is otherwise at risk of erasure. “Unlike most libraries, where archives are often stowed silently away until a researcher comes knocking, RIMA’s staff and partners proactively promote its use,” writes Ann Cooper for Nieman Reports. “Bard offers small grants to faculty who use RIMA in developing courses focused on media literacy and authoritarian challenges to independent journalism, and there are stipends for graduate students whose theses incorporate the archive’s material in their research.” Additionally, RIMA’s creators are intending the archive to be a template for other journalists facing censorship and oppression. “We don’t want history erased, as it’s been before in Russia,” said Jonathan Becker, executive vice president, vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College. “Unfortunately, with this growth of authoritarianism, [Russia] is not the only place where you’ll need to preserve independent media in a viable way.”

Author Maya Binyam has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Binyam’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2025 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Binyam will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman intrigues from its opening sentence as it builds a mysterious Beckettesque world of dark comic disorientation, never allowing the reader to grow complacent as it explores the essence of belonging and displacement. Cain’s infamous question to God in Genesis echoes in the reader’s mind as we watch Binyam’s unnamed narrator strive to be his brother’s finder, encountering innumerable obstacles in his once-familiar homeland. This existential quest makes us rebuild our assumptions from the ground up: what is a refugee? What is a family? How do we find our way home? Binyam builds a universe of alluring elusivity with consummate authority.”

“I’m honored and overjoyed to have been read so generously by the judges of the Bard Fiction Prize,” said Binyam. “Novel writing, for me, is fundamentally mysterious, strange, and almost impossible. This recognition makes it feel more possible, and inevitable, too. I’m very excited to join Bard’s literary community in the fall, and am beyond grateful for the opportunity to work on my second novel alongside its students and faculty. Knowing I’ll have this time to write is a dream.”

Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at Claremont McKenna College. She lives in Los Angeles.

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 2024 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Zain Khalid for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press 2022).