News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Poet Elizabeth Alexander and Painter Amy Sherald in Conversation

Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today with Elizabeth Alexander and Amy Sherald 
Bard High School Early College Manhattan, October 31 at 6:30 p.m.

Lunch Hour Talk with Amy Sherald and Thelma Golden
Bard at Brooklyn Public Library, November 1 at 12:45 p.m.

Watch Live Starting at 6:30 Eastern Time on October 31:



Bard High School Early College Manhattan (BHSEC) hosts a discussion with poet Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald about their creative processes and their commitments to the humanities. This public conversation seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place on Wednesday, October 31, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at BHSEC on 525 East Houston Street in New York City. Preregistration is required. Register here. A live webcast of the event will also be available.

Poet and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald have both produced works critical to marking and reflecting on recent periods of political and social change in the United States. Alexander wrote and recited the poem “Praise Song for Our Day” to usher forward the presidency of the first black American president, Barack Obama, and Sherald painted the official portrait of the first lady, Michelle Obama, one of two works to mark the end of the Obama Presidency. Moderators BHSEC literature professor Brittney Edmonds and Bard Associate Professor of History Christian Crouch will ask Alexander and Sherald four contextualizing questions around the process of patronage and collecting in the arts, artistic practice and black feminism, how their work speaks across artistic media, and how their work engages with the image of body.

“This event, the first of a series, is inspired by an ongoing dialogue within Bard’s Africana Studies Program surrounding race and diversity and social engagement in the visual and performative arts. We hope to create the opportunity for public dialogue around creative artistic practice and the humanities, and how artists engage their audience and broader community,” says Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson.

This event is cosponsored by Humanities New York, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Undergraduate Program in Africana Studies, Bard High School Early College, and Bard American Studies Program.

On Thursday, November 1, from 12:45pm to 2:00pm, Amy Sherald will be in conversation with curator Thelma Golden at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), the first New York City Microcollege. In this inaugural Bard at BPL Lunch Hour Talk, Golden and Sherald discuss an understated aspect of the creative process: the relationship between curator and artist. Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has presided over exhibitions in which painter Amy Sherald’s works were included and was involved in the selection of Sherald to paint the portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place at BPL Central Library, Dweck Center, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. Preregistration is required. Register here.
 

Seth Greenland’s novel is “the tragicomic odyssey of a virtuous man with a chink in his armor that proves his unlikely undoing,” writes Akst.

Daniel Mason’s new novel, The Winter Soldier, “is his first about a doctor and, in part, a coming-of-age story about what that profession can demand and return.”

“This fine book,” Aldous writes, “while not as obviously thrilling as Tony Judt’s earlier Postwar (2005), has a number of interesting things to say.”

The New Academy, founded after the 2018 Swedish Academy prize was cancelled in the aftermath of a sexual assault scandal, names Gaiman to its shortlist of four.

Morley, whose “Brent, Bandit King” is narrated by a computer program known as the Facilitator, talks about AI, the gaming world, and his story’s path to publication.

“The literary world should make greater efforts to reach teenagers, and more high schools should promote contemporary literature by living authors.”

“Machines take advantage of the particularity of each person’s appearance to flatten out our collective individuality,” writes Cole.

Bard College has received two grants from the NEH in support of faculty-led humanities projects, part of the endowment’s third and last round of funding for fiscal year 2018.

Binet’s new novel is a police procedural featuring the most influential figures of postmodern critical theory.

First, writes Fiori, we have to recognize the latent marginalization of minority populations in the mainstream media.

Assistant Professor of Literature Peter L’Official on how Arthur Jafa manipulates time to illuminate black experience in the video collage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.

The New Academy Prize in Literature—which is open to public voting—provides an alternative to this year’s canceled Nobel Prize in Literature, and Neil Gaiman is among the nominees.

Grayson Morley is a Bard College written arts graduate from the Class of 2013. Grayson is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  

"I'm working on an absurdist novel about UPS efficiency tracking, part of which will comprise my thesis when I graduate," he explains. "I teach both creative writing and English courses as part of my funding package."

After graduating from Bard, Grayson had a six-month fellowship focusing on farm worker labor rights in western New York. He then returned to Bard to work with the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs for two years. "If your plan is to go to grad school, take some time off first," he says. "No, seriously. I received this advice from mentors, and while I was loathe to take it ('How many cover letters do I have to write?'), the years I spent working provided experiences that enriched my current course of education."

"My Bard education proved to me the value of inquisitiveness and unwavering idealism," Grayson observes. "Mentors like Mary Caponegro and Matthew Mutter not only shaped my time in Annandale, but have remained treasured resources, and friends, into my life beyond Bard. My involvement with the Bard Prison Initiative remains a formative experience in my trajectory as an educator and person. I am deeply proud of my association with it, and with Bard as a whole."

What did he like best about Bard? "You never met a boring person. There were no carbon copies: everyone was so sincerely into their own, particular thing. My friends jokingly called it the Island of Misfit Toys, but since graduating, I've come to greatly miss that eclectic community."

"Things will be messy at first," Grayson says of life after graduation. "Possibly disheartening. But embrace what comes—then work like hell to find your ideal."

With 68.5 million people forced from their homes in 2017, Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman explains why every one of them needs our help.

“My class at Bard College is like a book group that I don't have to be democratic about. It's great to be able to talk to people about books that you love.” 

Professor O’Neill talks about his new story collection Good Trouble and writing in the age of Trump.

This new volume “offers an English reader a personal tour through the private quarters of Tchaikovsky to his most informal and intimate zone.”

“The great thing about Norse mythology is that right at the end it gives you hope, just when you think you’re done.”

Professor of comparative literature Joseph Luzzi reviews new translations of works by the contemporary Italian novelists Domenico Starnone, Paolo Cognetti, and Edgardo Franzosini.

Conjunctions:70, Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue features new work from Diane Ackerman, Mary Jo Bang, Julia Elliott, Nam Le, Peter Orner, Donald Revell, and others.

Seniors Elena LeFevre, Nicola Koepnick, Adelina Colaku, Page Benoit, and Madeleine Breshears, and Bethany Zulick ’16 are among the Fulbright winners for 2018–19.

Farrow was recognized for a series of articles that contributed to a “worldwide reckoning” regarding sexual harassment and assault and the dynamics of gender and power.

Professor Baldasso, director of Bard’s Italian Studies Program, was awarded the fellowship for his work on literary dissent during the transition from Fascism to democracy in Italy.

“If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big” (Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books). 

Neil Gaiman’s ghoulish children’s novella Coraline is being adapted by the Royal Opera in London.

On Monday, April 2, novelist and short story writer Laura van den Berg, winner of the 2015 Bard Fiction Prize, will read from her work at Bard College.

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music will present the Harmony and Power conference and concert series on March 30–31 on the Bard College campus.

Long Soldier received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry collection Whereas, “a brilliantly innovative text that examines history, landscapes, and identities.”

Russian novelist, essayist, and short story writer Tatyana Tolstaya will read from her new collection Aetherial Worlds.

On Thursday, March 29, prominent Russian novelist, essayist, short story writer, and public intellectual Tatyana Tolstaya will speak at Bard College about her new book, Aetherial Worlds, a collection of 18 stories.

“One of the finest, most dimensional inquiries into the significance of books and the role of reading in human life comes from Neil Gaiman.”

Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, written 20 years ago and now adapted for the screen as Submission, complicates the current cultural conversation about sexual harassment.

On Monday, March 5, Daniel Mendelsohn will give a book reading and signing followed by a wine reception for his new book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

The National Book Award finalist and 2017 Bard Fiction Prize-winning novelist Karan Mahajan will read from his work on February 26.

Bard College has launched a tuition-free, degree-granting microcollege in the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. This innovative new program is designed to help nontraditional students who have been deterred, discouraged, or excluded from higher education to achieve associate degrees in the liberal arts, at no cost and in their home community.

The National Book Award finalist and 2017 Bard Fiction Prize-winning novelist Karan Mahajan will read from his work on February 26.

"Docile and utilitarian bodies of women and peoples of color, a compliant natural world—these are the operational goals of unreconstructed (and white supremacist) patriarchal society."

Bard College is one of five top schools taking part in the pilot expansion of a program developed to teach students to write for the real world.

Author Carmen Maria Machado, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from her work on February 19.

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose reviews David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell.

Mendelsohn weaves Homer's epic with episodes from his own life in a book of "shimmering, beautiful, dapple-skilled intelligence" about his relationship with his father.

Chinua Achebe—an icon of African literature and beloved professor at Bard—was recognized with a Google Doodle on Thursday, November 16, on what would have been his 87th birthday.

Conjunctions:69, Being Bodies—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—is an exploration of the complex circumstances of flesh-and-blood existence. A memoir of distance running counterpoints a meditation on resurrection. The story of an injury is juxtaposed with an uncommonly candid confession of a young man who struggles with gender identity and sexual orientation. In every contribution come fresh insights into what it means to inhabit our bodies for a brief moment in time. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Being Bodies features new work from Mary Caponegro, Edward Carey, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nomi Eve, Michael Ives, Carole Maso, Rick Moody, Kyoko Mori, Dina Nayeri, Stephen O’Connor, Peter Orner, Jorge Ángel Pérez, Rosamond Purcell, Sallie Tisdale, Anne Waldman, and others.

On Monday, November 13, celebrated fantasy writer and critic Elizabeth Hand reads from her fiction collection Saffron and Brimstone. The Washington Post writes, "Hand's work is pulsing with tension throughout, charged with its own chilling luminosity." Hand will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.

Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason examines how the classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice.

On Monday, October 30, celebrated author Diane Ackerman will read from The Zookeeper’s Wife at Bard College. This little-known true story of World War II enjoyed months as the New York Times No. 1 nonfiction bestseller, was the basis for a 2017 feature film of the same title, and received the Orion Book Award, which honored it as “a groundbreaking work of nonfiction, in which the human relationship to nature is explored in an absolutely original way through looking at the Holocaust.” Ackerman will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading (ICFR) series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. at Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and will be followed by a Q&A. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

Author Carmen Maria Machado has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties. In the collection, long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Machado shapes startling, genre-bending narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Machado’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2018 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

What happens when Professor Daniel Mendelsohn's 81-year-old father enrolls in his Odyssey seminar at Bard? The author discusses his new memoir on Friday, October 20.

Professor Emeritus John Ashbery passed away last month. Here, Ann Lauterbach shares her 2011 introduction of the poet upon receipt of his National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.