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
- 4/19FridayFriday, April 19, 2024
Bard Hall 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In Ancient Greece, professional performers of Homer were called Rhapsodes. Their job was to memorize Homeric poetry and perform it at festivals around Greece. Today we honor their tradition and that of Bill Mullen, a former professor of Classics and Rhetoric at Bard College.
The Contest
The Bill Mullen Recitation Contest is an annual competition amongst Bard College and BHSEC Cleveland students. The recitation prize competition encourages the love of literature, the joy in oral recitation, the committing to memory of great poetry, the love of public speaking, and the agonal spirit, all of which are at the heart of how we remember Bill Mullen’s intellectual legacy. The Bill Mullen Recitation contest aims to expose students to, and perhaps instill a love for, the art of memorizing and reciting poetry. Read more here.
We are no longer accepting entries as we have reached our upper limit for capacity at the event!
Contest Rules
- Participants must be undergraduates at Bard College.
- Poem must be recited in English (translations into English are welcome).
- The poem’s author must be deceased.
- Full texts only, no excerpts.
- Recitation length: no longer than 3 minutes.
- Entry deadline: April 12, 2024.
Prizes:
$500 1st place
$100 2nd place
Who Is Bill Mullen?
In 2021, Bard College announced the William C. Mullen Memorial Fund, created by a generous donation from longtime Bard professor Bill Mullen. This fund is used to promote his legacy through grants to any of Bill’s former students to continue their studies in the liberal arts and sciences. William “Bill” Mullen (1946–2017) was a professor of classics and taught at Bard from 1985 until his death.
Read more about Professor Mullen here
Who Are the Judges?
Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He writes on the intersection of literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He also writes on contemporary art, new media technology, and the history and practice of liberal education.
Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, will be published by Penguin Random House in March (2023). She writes at the intersection of poetics, politics and the visual arts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts) at Bard College.
- 4/22Monday
Photo credit: Judith CluteMonday, April 22, 2024
The acclaimed, genre-spanning writer reads from her work.
Campus Center, Weis Cinema EVENT CANCELED
Novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Hand will read from new work at Bard College on Monday, April 22 at 4:00 pm in Weis Cinema, located in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Hand is the author of over 20 genre-spanning, award-winning novels and collections of short fiction. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is an homage to Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House and was commissioned by Jackson’s family. The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public.
A longtime critic and reviewer, Hand’s writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Boston Review, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other outlets. Her noir novels featuring post-punk photographer and provocateur Cass Neary have been translated into myriad languages and are being developed for a TV series. Hand has been an instructor at writing workshops across the US and abroad, including Oxford and Pakistan, and is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London, and is at work on Unspeakable Things, which is loosely inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Praise for Elizabeth Hand
“Hand has a gift for the sensuous, evocative detail, and her descriptions are often simultaneously seductive and spooky.” —The New Yorker
“A Haunting on the Hill is a love letter to Hill House and a very impressive tribute to Shirley Jackson. It is also a tremendous addition to Hand’s already outstanding, multi-genre oeuvre.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“Only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson’s rage, wit, and vision with a 21st century twist. The old place is as creepy, disorienting, and menacing as ever.” —Paul Tremblay
“To describe Elizabeth Hand as a mystery writer is to not have read another Elizabeth Hand book. Over decades, she has proved that she’s eclectic, genre-bending, and comfortable in fantasy and mystery, crime, myth, magic—and more.” —The Washington Post
- 4/25ThursdayThursday, April 25, 2024
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Thursday, April 25 at 6 pm in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Terrance Hayes will read from his work. He will be introduced by Erica Kaufman, Bard Writer in Residence and Director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking. The reading will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dawn Lundy Martin, Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University. - 5/01WednesdayWednesday, May 1, 2024
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey
For WRIT 345: Imagining Nonhuman Consciousness