Written Arts News
Jenny Offill Receives Dora Maar House Residency
The residency is awarded to outstanding arts and humanities professionals.
Jenny Offill Receives Dora Maar House Residency
Jenny Offill, writer in residence.
The Written Arts Program at Bard encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.
Post Date: 04-15-2026
New Book by Bard Writer in Residence Benjamin Hale Featured in Chronogram
“The story really only works as nonfiction,” he told Chronogram. “It’s so weird it wouldn’t be believable as a novel.”
New Book by Bard Writer in Residence Benjamin Hale Featured in Chronogram
Benjamin Hale, writer in residence. Photo by Rachel Collet
Hale will discuss the book in conversation with Ryan Chapman at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck on March 12 at 6 pm.
Post Date: 03-11-2026
Valeria Luiselli Interviewed in the New Yorker
Luiselli was interviewed about her story “Predictions and Presentiments,” which is drawn from her upcoming book, Beginning Middle End.
Valeria Luiselli Interviewed in the New Yorker
Valeria Luiselli. Photo by Alfredo Pelcastre
The Written Arts Program at Bard encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.
Post Date: 02-16-2026
Upcoming Events
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4/16Thursday6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Stevenson Library
Black Poetry in Times of Crisis
A Reading and Conversation with Kevin Young and Evie Shockley
Thursday, April 16, 2026On Thursday, April 16th, at 6pm in the Stevenson Library, poets Kevin Young and Evie Shockley will come together for a reading and conversation on writing and poetry in times of crisis. This event will launch the Black Poetry Day Collection in the Stevenson Library. All are welcome to attend.
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Stevenson Library
Poet and literary scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, semiautomatic and the new black. Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and appeared internationally. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Stephen Henderson Award. Her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the former director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
The Black Poetry Day Collection was donated to Bard in 2023 by retired Director of the Plattsburgh Public Library Stanley Ransom and his wife, Christina Palhof Ransom (Bard alum ‘73). The collection includes autographed copies of books by each of the poets honored at Black Poetry Day at SUNY Plattsburgh from 1970 to the present.
Contact: Megan Brien
E-mail: [email protected]
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4/17Friday6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Stevenson Library
Student Reading at the Stevenson Library
Friday, April 17, 2026
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Stevenson Library
The Written Arts Program will be hosting a Student Reading at the Stevenson Library! Listen to passionate writers and meet other creatives. If you are unable to read your own work, bring something to share.
Contact: Megan Brien
E-mail: [email protected]
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4/21Tuesday5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
A Reading by French Poet Marie de Quatrebarbes
Followed by a Conversation with her Translator, Aiden Farrell
Tuesday, April 21, 2026Marie de Quatrebarbes will be reading from her book The Vitals (Les Vivres, P.O.L., 2021), recently translated by Aiden Farrell and published by World Poetry, 2025. The Vitals, her debut in English translation, is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Marie de Quatrebarbes is the author of several books of poetry, as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, and the recipient of the 2020 Paul-Verlaine Prize from the Academie Française. Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti. She lives and works in Paris.
Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator and editor. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in poetry and translation, he is the managing editor of Futurepoem, where he has worked since 2018.
Contact: Éric Trudel
E-mail: [email protected]