The Written Arts Program
encourages students to experiment with their own writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities, and the past and current literary landscapes. Students are encouraged to consider how their writing is and can be an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world around us. It is expected that Written Arts students are also passionate readers.Why I Chose Bard Written Arts
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Alex BeattyBorn and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Alex Beatty decided on Bard after visiting a literature class taught by Professor Marina Van Zuylen. Once at Bard, he chose to moderate into Written Arts. “I wanted to have the opportunity to focus on my own creative projects.”
Alex Beatty
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Alex Beatty decided on Bard after visiting a literature class taught by Professor Marina Van Zuylen. Once at Bard, he chose to moderate into Written Arts. “I wanted to have the opportunity to focus on my own creative projects.”
After spending the second semester of his first year at Bard College Berlin, he became a double major in Written Arts and German Studies. For his German Studies Senior Project, Alex translated Der Stein von Werder [The Stone of Werder], a novella by the Baltic-German animal behaviorist Jakob von Uexküll. In it, three sisters attempt to uncover the meaning of a semilegible stone inscription. “I was drawn to The Stone by Uexküll’s use of narrative to explain his theory of meaning,” says Alex, “which also figured into my creative Senior Project, Pistacia Atlantica, a novel about stories written in the margins of old books.”
Of translation, Alex says: “As a learning experience, a creative challenge, and a valued service, translation work has allowed me to continue pursuing my interests since graduating Bard while also helping me to grow as a writer. It has also given me the opportunity to travel, last year to Uexküll’s archives in Tartu, Estonia, and later this year to Perth, Australia, where I’ll be presenting my research on Uexküll and his literary legacy.” It has given him the opportunity to translate contemporaries of Uexküll, such as Heine Hediger, whose research on the dreams of animals has been neglected by translators in the past. Alex has also been working with the writer Rivka Galchen, for whom he’s translating testimonies from the 17th-century witch trial of Katharina Kepler.
Alex also works as an administrative assistant at The Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by the late editor of the New York Review of Books to support writers in the fields of reportage and criticism. “It’s had a profound impact on how I think of writing as a career,” Alex says. “Silvers’s legendary work ethic and passion for nuanced writing and the writers with whom I correspond in my capacity as an administrative assistant have been a daily inspiration for me to continue writing. I have never been sure exactly how writing will fit into my future, because it has taken so many unexpected forms since I decided to make it a career, but I look forward to pursuing new opportunities and continuing my projects in fiction, nonfiction, and translation.” -
Julie JaremaJulie Jarema transferred to Bard from NYU, drawn by its flexible curriculum and eclectic community. She arrived intending to take a critical approach to the study of literature, but a fiction workshop with Porochista Khakpour drew her to Written Arts.
Julie Jarema
Julie Jarema transferred to Bard from NYU, drawn by its flexible curriculum and eclectic community. She arrived intending to take a critical approach to the study of literature, but a fiction workshop with Porochista Khakpour drew her to Written Arts.
Julie explains, “I’ve always enjoyed writing and illustrating stories, primarily for children. However, my Senior Project pushed me toward approaching writing in a more absurd, experimental way and taught me that writing for an older audience doesn’t mean that the writing has to lose its playfulness.”
Julie’s project, “The Museum,” is a novel about a rootless girl whose employer, a reclusive author and the owner of an obscure museum, sends her on a scavenger hunt through Manhattan to gather artifacts for a new exhibition. As Mia’s quest draws her into spiraling mysteries of identity and artifact, the roles of the author and the reader become increasingly entangled.
At Bard, Julie’s interests also drew her to French, comparative literature, and the experimental humanities. In addition, during her undergraduate years she served as an editorial assistant at Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions, as an intern with Miriam Altshuler at the literary agency DeFiore & Co., and as a children’s marketing and publicity intern with Simon & Schuster. The last of these led to Simon & Schuster taking her on full-time as a children’s books associate immediately upon her graduation in 2016.
Spotlight on Our Faculty
The Written Arts Program is staffed by distinguished writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction who emphasize both innovative, experimental work and work that foregrounds the conventions of writing.
Written Arts Faculty Reading Series
From 2020
Upcoming Events
- 10/21MondayMonday, October 21, 2024
The internationally renowned writer will read from her work.
Chapel of the Holy Innocents 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Internationally renowned writer Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at Bard College on Monday, October 21, at 4:00 pm in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, among many other honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls.
The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public. With Morrow, Oates is co-editing Conjunctions:83, Revenants, The Ghost Issue, which will be published in November. Revenants will bring together fiction and poetry on the “unliving-living” by a wide array of esteemed writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Ben Okri, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Patricia Smith, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Carroll, Reggie Oliver, James Morrow, Can Xue, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, and others.
Praise for Joyce Carol Oates
“It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination . . . who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers.” —The New York Times Magazine
“Her short stories—she has won more Pushcart Prizes than any other writer—feel perfect, like tight circles around a kind of unspoken abyss.” —The New Yorker - 10/22Tuesday
Photo by Karen LueTuesday, October 22, 2024
with Diana Khoi Nguyen
Blithewood 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Tuesday, October 22 at 6:30 pm at Blithewood, Diana Khoi Nguyen will read from her work. The reading will be followed by a moderated Q&A.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She's received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Read more about Diana Khoi Nguyen’s work here. - 10/23WednesdayWednesday, October 23, 2024
A Conversation with Lina Attalah and Dina Ramadan
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Wednesday, October 23 at 6pm in Weis Cinema, Dina Ramadan will be joined in conversation by Lina Attalah. Lina Attalah has worked as a journalist for the last two decades, covering some of the Arab world's most significant events. As co-founder and editor of Mada Masr, a leading independent online newspaper, she will discuss some of the challenges and risks of working as a journalist in Egypt today and journalism as an act that gestures toward truth finding as opposed to a finitude.
Lina Attalah is the publisher and founding editor of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based news website. She has been a journalist covering the region for the last two decades, with reporting on revolutions in Egypt and Lebanon, civil wars in Syria and Sudan, the siege of Gaza, and electoral politics in Iran.
Dina A. Ramadan is Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies, and Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies. She is a 2023 recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.