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
- 11/21Thursday6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Chapel of the Holy Innocents
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Chapel of the Holy Innocents 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
On Thursday, November 21 at 6pm in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Visiting Instructor of Music and Written Arts Professor Franz Nicolay will read from his work. Followed by a discussion with chart analyst and pop critic Chris Molanphy, the reading is free and open to the student body.
Franz Nicolay is a musician and writer living in New York’s Hudson Valley. In addition to records under his own name (“a natural-born star”—Pitchfork), he was a member of cabaret-punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society, “world’s best bar band” the Hold Steady (“one of the all-time great New York bands”—Rolling Stone), Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, co-founded the composer-performer collective Anti-Social Music, was a touring member of agit-punks Against Me!; and recorded or performed with dozens of other acts. His first book, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar, was named a “Season’s Best Travel Book” by The New York Times. His second book, the novel Someone Should Pay For Your Pain, was called “a knockout fiction debut” by Buzzfeed; and was named one of Rolling Stone's “Best Music Books of 2021” (“finally, the great indie-rock novel…like Dostoyevsky in a DIY punk space”). In fall 2024, his third book Band People, a non-fiction study of the working and creative lives of musicians, appeared on University of Texas Press’ American Music series. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review Online, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He has taught at UC–Berkeley and in Columbia University’s MFA fiction program, and is currently a faculty member in music and written arts at Bard College.
Chris Molanphy is a chart analyst and pop critic who writes about the intersection of culture and commerce in popular music. For Slate, he created and hosts the Hit Parade podcast and writes their “Why Is This Song No. 1?” series. His most recent book is Old Town Road (DUP, 2023), about the Lil Nas X song of the same name and the chart history and race/genre intersections that led to its record-setting chart run. Chris’s work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vulture, NPR Music’s The Record, The Village Voice, Billboard and CMJ. Chris has also been a frequent guest on National Public Radio (All Things Considered, On the Media, Planet Money, Soundcheck), on SiriusXM and on numerous podcasts including the Culture Gabfest and the New York Times Popcast - 12/03Tuesday5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
On Tuesday, December 3, at 5:30pm, in the Bitó Conservatory Building Performance Space, poet Will Alexander will read from his work. Introduced by David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature Ann Lauterbach, this reading is free and open to the public.
This reading will take place one day after Will Alexander's Leslie Scalapino Lecture, Hyper-Spacial Rotation: Poetic Circular Deepening. This lecture will take place on December 2, at 6:30pm in RKC 103, for any who are interested.
Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal Callaloo in 1999. Author of 20 books (including Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents, Inside The Earthquake Palace: 4 Plays, Above The Human Nerve Domain, and Exobiology As Goddess), Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. Alexander’s 2021 book, Refractive Africa, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and won the California Book Award in Poetry. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.
Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh poetry collection, Door, was published in March 2023; previous volumes include Spell (2018), Under the Sign (2013), and Or to Begin Again (2009), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her prose was collected in The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2008) and The Given & The Chosen (2011). Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She was cochair of writing in Bard’s MFA Program from 1992 to 2020 and is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature.