News and Events

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Joseph O’Neill Interviewed by the New York Review of Books on the State of US Democracy

Daniel Drake interviewed Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts Joseph O’Neill for the New York Review of Books, speaking to O’Neill about his assessment of the state of authoritarianism and resistance in the United States. “The end of the rule of law does not mean that we automatically find ourselves in an authoritarian society,” O’Neill said, but cautioned Democrats against being “distracted by the past.” “The (dubious) strategies hatched by their consultants in response to Trump’s win—‘talk about egg prices,’ ‘work with Republicans,’ and so on—make even less sense than usual,” O’Neill said. “New strategies, new faces, and a new level of adversarial exertion will be required.”

Post Date: 03-25-2025

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Opinion: “Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World” Writes M. Gessen for the New York Times

In an opinion piece for the New York Times published on the same day Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vance collapsed, Distinguished Visiting Writer M. Gessen wrote, “Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.” As a Russian exile, Gessen asserts that Putin’s “negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945.” Although what will happen now in Ukraine is uncertain, Gessen predicts if Russia moves to unleash its aggression against Europe, it will not look like “the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century” or like “the world in which we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy countries have felt safe.”

Post Date: 03-04-2025

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Dinaw Mengestu Interviewed in World Literature Today

Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, was interviewed in World Literature Today about his latest novel, Someone Like Us. “In this brilliant novel, both mystery and meditation, Mengestu challenges that dominant narrative with a multiplicity of stories which make it impossible for us to look away,” writes Renee H. Shea for World Literature Today. Mengestu spoke with Shea about how questions of ethics and representation appear in his work, how photographs taken by his wife appear throughout the text to offer another narrative within the novel, and how he approaches physical and geographical movement of his characters across time, place, continent, and cultures. “The novel is not just about seeing that community in one moment in time but over the course of an entire generation,” Mengestu said. “Looking more deeply into that world is the heart of this story, and in many ways this is the community that I wanted to reach out to the most.”
 

Post Date: 02-25-2025

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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