Our Students

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Evan Tims

At Bard, Evan’s interests were wide-ranging. “I switched around a lot between majors,” he says. “I planned on doing written arts and environmental and urban studies, spent some time in political studies, flirted with philosophy for a while. Ultimately, I did a joint major in human rights and written arts, and did most of my coursework in the Anthropology department. I was never really happy just sticking with one subject, so I just followed my interests throughout a variety of methodologies.”

It was through taking this route that Evan arrived back at two of his loves— writing and environmental studies. “My main passion coalesced around climate change,” he says. “Specifically, I became interested in how climate change is reflected through literature and other cultural formats, and how it poses a kind of epistemological threat to forms of academic thinking and even conventional literary structures.” 

Evan’s interest in climate change is a lens he uses to view the rest of the world. “I’m especially interested in the different temporalities of climate change in modern life— how we buy life insurance despite knowing that the world will fundamentally change in the next 30 to 40 years, and how we think our life plans are somehow distinct from broader societal shifts in relation to the environment,” he says. “Eventually I realized that, for me, climate change is ‘the’ topic—it’s the focus of my creative work, my academic studies, and most of my personal thinking. But I’m always trying to find ways of approaching it sideways—that is, through culture and creative thought more than through conventional scientific understandings.”

For his Senior Project, Evan combined research and creative writing to produce a hybrid piece about climate change that included a philosophical and anthropological survey, as well as a collection of short stories. “My stories are mostly set in a general near-future, and the characters are learning to live with the knowledge that their world has changed,” he says. “Typically, I find that climate fiction is almost exclusively an apocalyptic genre, which has its own tropes and politics about survival and the value of society, and I wanted to skirt around most of that and contend with climate change as a broader regime shift in how people view themselves and the world around them.”

For the past two summers, Evan has been studying Bengali in Kolkata, India, and he hopes to do ethnographic and literary research in South Asia. “I got to witness firsthand the kinds of immediate impacts of climate change that aren’t as visible in the U.S.,” he says, “and I had the chance to engage with the rich literary tradition of Bengal, which has influenced a lot of my work.”

Evan plans to spend the next few years focusing on writing and submitting his creative work. He also has a novel about climate change planned out, would like to spend more time in South Asia, and is thinking about graduate school programs in cultural anthropology. “I’d like to combine writing and ethnography to do interdisciplinary work,” he says. “After that, I’m not sure—but I know I’ll always keep writing.”

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Geneva Zane

As a student, she was able to take a variety of classes outside of written arts. “I took a lot of music history courses as well as composition and performance. It was great to be in a space where I had no mastery, nor any expectation of mastery, as opposed to my senior project,” she says.
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Geneva’s project, House God, won the prestigious Wilton Moore Lockwood Prize. She describes it as “a series of poetic essays cataloging different forms of internal and external worship, and the shape our beliefs take.”
Geneva also credits her 2014 internship with the Bard-based literary magazine Conjunctions as an influential experience. She describes the process of watching a publication operate as clarifying. Seeing publications from the inside “stripped them of their mystery and power,” she says.

Since graduating, Geneva has published a novel, Stringbean and the Grace of Dog, released in 2019 by Pink Narcissus Press.

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Jada Smiley

Jada had been writing throughout high school, submitting to competitions and journals and going on to win a Faulkner Society prize and publish in Sleepingfish (now known as Calamari). 

Once at Bard, Jada was drawn to the intimate feel of the Written Arts Program and the close connections with professors. “Michael Ives and Celia Bland were indispensable,” she says, “both in the writing of my senior project and in pursuit of a certain kind of voice and a certain kind of confidence.”

Jada’s Senior Project, “Free Running Brown Legs,” won the Written Arts Prize in 2018. When describing what it felt like to write it, Jada noted stages of frustration and liberation. “I felt slotted into a particular category, a particular style of writing, a particular voice. I think I just wanted to liberate myself through the use of language in general. I set out with a clean slate, and I kind of wiped my poetry of all preconceived notions of what I should be writing.” She studied everything from Buddhism to the German idealists, thinking all the while about how everything connected. “I couldn’t help but have a very global approach,” she says.

And she still remembers the guidance of her Senior Project adviser, Celia Bland. “Celia had read one of my works, which was kind of bogged down by imperious Oxford English Dictionary language. She told me: ‘Jada, someone needs to get a beer in your poem. There’s no breathing room.’ So she helped me open up the language a bit. There was absolutely no room for interpretation or even antagonization of the principles I was laying forth.”

After graduating, Jada has continued to revisit her Senior Project. “The poems are a work in progress, an exercise in chaos and letting things be and not censoring myself for the sake of sounding how I thought people wanted me to sound.” And Jada remains open to the way in which writing figures into her future. “I have many loves and interests,” she says, “and writing is certainly one of the top tier interests I have. It’s high on the priority list. I write every day.”

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Naomi LaChance

However, she says, “Along the way I developed an appreciation for lots of other ideas, which I really appreciate. I majored in history as well as in Written Arts, and a lot of my favorite classes were literature classes. There’s something really satisfying about picking apart a text. History and literature are both about interpretation, which I think is really cool.” Naomi also worked for three years at the Bard Learning Commons, offering academic support to her peers.

For Naomi’s Senior Project, she crafted “a nonfiction piece about media credibility. I looked at the story of the massacre at El Mozote in 1981, which was widely discredited as propaganda despite its being on the front page of the Washington Post and New York Times. (Bard professor Mark Danner finally showed it was true in the New Yorker in 1993.)” An extremely self-motivated student, Naomi completed this project while spending her last Bard semester interning at NPR in Washington, D.C. “I got to write about the news, collect audio for All Things Considered and Morning Edition, and go to Tiny Desk Concerts.”

She parlayed that experience into freelance journalism, writing for the Intercept, Motherboard, and NPR, and in June 2016 she accepted a prestigious internship at Intercept’s D.C. bureau covering national security and politics.