News and Events

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Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us Named One of Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024

The latest book by Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, has been featured on a list of art that inspired former president Barack Obama in 2024. Mengestu’s novel, Someone Like Us, tells the story of the son of Ethiopian immigrants who seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. In exploring this history, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around his father’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them.

Post Date: 01-06-2025

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Annual Bard Fiction Prize Is Awarded to Maya Binyam

Author Maya Binyam has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Binyam’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2025 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Binyam will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman intrigues from its opening sentence as it builds a mysterious Beckettesque world of dark comic disorientation, never allowing the reader to grow complacent as it explores the essence of belonging and displacement. Cain’s infamous question to God in Genesis echoes in the reader’s mind as we watch Binyam’s unnamed narrator strive to be his brother’s finder, encountering innumerable obstacles in his once-familiar homeland. This existential quest makes us rebuild our assumptions from the ground up: what is a refugee? What is a family? How do we find our way home? Binyam builds a universe of alluring elusivity with consummate authority.”

“I’m honored and overjoyed to have been read so generously by the judges of the Bard Fiction Prize,” said Binyam. “Novel writing, for me, is fundamentally mysterious, strange, and almost impossible. This recognition makes it feel more possible, and inevitable, too. I’m very excited to join Bard’s literary community in the fall, and am beyond grateful for the opportunity to work on my second novel alongside its students and faculty. Knowing I’ll have this time to write is a dream.”

Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at Claremont McKenna College. She lives in Los Angeles.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. The 2024 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Zain Khalid for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press 2022).

Post Date: 10-14-2024

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Internationally Renowned Writer Joyce Carol Oates Will Give a Reading at Bard College on October 21

On Monday, October 21, at 4 pm, internationally renowned writer Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at Bard College 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.

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Post Date: 09-24-2024

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Bard Prison Initiative Announces Javier Fuentes as Paris Review Visiting Professor

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), in partnership with the Paris Review, is pleased to announce that Javier Fuentes has joined its faculty through the Paris Review Visiting Professorship, a position created for a distinguished writer to teach a course on literature that has inspired them. Fuentes, a Spanish-American writer and 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel which chronicles a tumultuous, passionate love affair between two young men from vastly different worlds during one, extraordinary summer in Spain. Fuentes’s first course for BPI, called Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature, will explore the way time and place affect the structure of literary narrative. The Paris Review Visiting Professorship is just one of many additions that BPI, now in its 25th year, is embarking on for expanding its academic program, faculty, and community.

Post Date: 09-24-2024

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Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College Hosts 16th Annual International Conference on “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?” October 17–18

Participants Include New York Times Bestselling Author Sebastian Junger, Cultural Commentator and Artist Ayishat Akanbi, Turkish-born American Philosopher Seyla Benhabib, Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole, Arendtian Scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the commonsense connections that are part of living with and amidst one’s tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus, tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.

Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of people in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community. The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality.

Presented by OSUN, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and Center for Civic Engagement, the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics” responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. The conference asks: How can we make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to pluralist politics? The 16th annual Arendt conference will bring notable speakers to Bard College in Annandale to discuss the implications of tribalist politics just weeks before the national US election. 

The two-day conference takes place on Thursday, October 17 and Friday, October 18 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, New York campus. Register here.

Registration online closes on October 6th. On-site registration will remain open. The conference is free for Hannah Arendt Center members (plus one guest), Bard College students, faculty, and staff, as well as for members of the press. For non-members, the registration fee is $175. The conference can also be attended virtually via the live webcast. All registrants will receive a link to the live webcast.

The conference will also host a special student journalism contest, where young people will have the opportunity to cover the conference and be paid to have their writing, video, interviews, and photos published in the Hannah Arendt Center’s newsletter Amor Mundi.

Conference highlights include:

• Post-Lecture Discussion and Reflection with Sebastian Junger, in which the public may engage directly with the speaker
• “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism in Israel and Palestine,” a breakout session with Shai Lavi and Khaled Furani, two Israeli and Palestinian scholars and friends who will engage in conversation with the public
• “Bloods, Crips, and Overcoming Tribalism in Los Angeles,” a panel discussion with Mandar Apte, Phillip “Rock” Lester, and Gilbert Johnson, moderated by Niobe Way
• “Embodied Connection: Reimagining the Tribe,” a breakout session with Jacob Burda and Magnus Jonas Støre, cofounders of The Blue Initiative which aims to pioneer a novel approach within higher education
• A guided walking tour to visit Hannah Arendt’s grave on Bard College campus and her personal library archives housed at the Stevenson Library with Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Bard College’s Jana Mader

For the full conference schedule, click here.

Featured speakers include:
Ayishat Akanbi, a fashion stylist and writer based in London who challenges popular ideas by championing understanding, curiosity, and independent thought; Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University and currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University; Sebastian Junger, award-winning journalist, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Perfect Storm, as well as Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and In My Time of Dying; Joseph O’Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts at Bard whose novels include Netherland, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Godwin (2024); Fintan O’Toole, a prize–winning columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of The New York Review of Books; Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a fellow of the British Academy.

Read a full list of speakers with bios here.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College conferences are attended annually by nearly 1000 people and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil; whistleblower Edward Snowden; irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens; businessman Hunter Lewis; authors Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen, and Claudia Rankine; Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead; and political activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored citizenship and disobedience, crises of democracy, the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology, the crisis in American education, American exceptionalism, democracy under the tyranny of social media, and friendship and politics.

Post Date: 09-16-2024

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Bard Fiction Prize Winner Zain Khalid to Give Reading on September 23

Zain Khalid, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, September 23. The reading begins at 6 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. This event is free and open to the public. For more information call 845-758-7087. 

Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022). The Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another. First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail. Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West. And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.”

“I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.” 

Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Post Date: 09-04-2024