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. Writing so pursued then becomes part of a humanist education, in which the private effort of the writer addresses and becomes part of the world's discourse. It is expected that Written Arts students are also passionate readers.2020 Written Arts Faculty Reading Series
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.
Upcoming Events
- 10/01Friday9:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Online Event
Friday, October 1, 2021
Online Event 9:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
We planning for both the October 1 and November 5, 2021 Bard College IWT Writer as Reader Workshops to be held online. We look forward to returning to in-person workshops in 2022.
Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, to grasp the meaning in more complex texts, and to infer meaning from what they read. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice, one that shows rather than tells students how writing clarifies the meaning of texts. Working with diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants discover what they bring to the text, what is apparent in the text, what is inferred, and what questions the text poses.
Workshop offerings: Reading Climate, Writing Change: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s The Future We Choose: Surviving Climate Crisis “Vulnerable to Foreign Ways of Seeing and Thinking”: James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues” and Gloria Anzaldúa's “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness” Diving Into The Wreck: Daniel Defoe, Adrienne Rich, and J.M. Coetzee “Who Will Take Up the Body?”: Sara Uribe’s Antígona González Reimagines Antigone within Today’s Global Politics Othello and American Moor: Studying Shakespeare in a Racialized America Science and Disenchantment: Max Weber’s “Science as Vocation” and the Role of Science in Ethical Life Edith Wharton's Two New Yorks “It’s Getting Started That’s the Puzzle”: Kelly Reichardt, First Cow, and telling American stories "I would not paint — a picture —": Emily Dickinson’s Visual Poetics The Lavender Scare: Mid-century Fictions and Fears - 10/04Monday6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Monday, October 4, 2021
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
“Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. - 10/18Monday6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Monday, October 18, 2021
part of the Conjunctions Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in dense, visceral prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, lurid and phantasmagoric. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and an American Book Award. Richardson was also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the recipient of a 2021 Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, for which he has also received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. He will be a writer-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. - 11/05Friday9:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Online Event
Friday, November 5, 2021
Online Event 9:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
We planning for both the October 1 and November 5, 2021 Bard College IWT Writer as Reader Workshops to be held online. We look forward to returning to in-person workshops in 2022.
Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, to grasp the meaning in more complex texts, and to infer meaning from what they read. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice, one that shows rather than tells students how writing clarifies the meaning of texts. Working with diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants discover what they bring to the text, what is apparent in the text, what is inferred, and what questions the text poses.
Workshop offerings: Language Choice as Language Justice: Reading for Resistance in Postcolonial Texts Writing Home: Kinship, Citizenship, and Belonging in Sophocles’ Antigone and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home The Substance of Justice: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and “The Merchant of Venice” Walt Whitman: Looking, Listing, Vegetating Aha! Moments: Exploring Epiphanies in James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and ZZ Packer Tell It Slant: Grappling with Suffering through Science Fiction and Fable The Fractal Nature of Our World: The Mathematics of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia Trouble in Paradise: Visions of Black Utopia & Despair in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Marvel's Black Panther Issues in Translation: Poems that Prevail against Erasure Why We Walk: Teju Cole and Virginia Woolf - 11/08Monday6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Monday, November 8, 2021
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Jenny Offill is an acclaimed fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo. Offill previously taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina; and served as Visiting Writer at Syracuse University and Sarah Lawrence College, and as Writer in Residence at Vassar College and Pratt University. She has been a Visiting Writer in Residence at Bard College since 2020.