Language and Thinking Faculty

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William Alba

Hello, world. I was born in the Bronx, raised in small-town Ohio, and studied at Cornell University and UC Berkeley. For seventeen years I directed the Science and Humanities Scholars Program and the Pre-College Summer Session at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, I was Associate Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College; Tutor [Professor] at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, where I founded the Monte Sol Writing Workshop in association with the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking; Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Coordinator of Mathematics and Science at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Bard College; and Instructor of Chemistry and Physics at Phillips Academy. Current interests include travel, translation, and issues related to communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Jonathon Atkinson

Jonathon Atkinson's writing has appeared in n+1, New Ohio Review, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. He is a 2026-28 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He lives in Petaluma, California.

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Andrew K. Atwell

Primary Academic Programs: Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies

Academic Program Affiliations: Middle Eastern Studies

Biography:
B.S., Eckerd College; M.A., University of Virginia; M.A. (Religious Studies), M.A.
(Anthropology), Ph.D., University of Chicago.

Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting
Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies at Bard
College. He is the author of “Resuscitating Torah: ‘Judaization,’ Moral Imagination, and
National-Religious hesed in Central Israel” in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy,
forthcoming 2026; “Religion, Authority, Grammar: The Scholarly Legacy of Secular Concepts”
in Buddhist Violence and Religious Authority: A Tribute to the Work of Michael Jerryson,
2022. He is broadly interested in moral imagination in its relation to political theology, political
economy, and traditions of critical reflectivity, and his primary focus is on national-religious
Israeli Judaism. His current book project, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral
Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination at work in a
national-religious “social settlement” movement that has settled in Israel’s binational cities since
the mid-1990s. Fellowships include: Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant;
Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies; Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies Research
Grant, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

Contact:
Email: [email protected]
Location: Hopson
Office: 203

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Felix Bernstein '13

Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama, using errant bodies of imagery and discourse to bore holes through crusty ideals. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015), and director, with Gabe Rubin, of Madame de Void (2018). He has performed at institutions including Artists Space, LA MOCA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Nicole Caso

Professor Caso’s areas of expertise include Hispanic languages and literature and Latin  American literature. She is the author of Practicing Memory in Central American  Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); has contributed a chapter to The Cambridge History of  Latin American Women's Literature; and explored the implications of literacy in “‘Walking the  Path of Letters’: Negotiating Assimilation and Difference in Contemporary Mayan Literature,”  published in CHASQUI: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana. Additionally, her work has been  published in scholarly journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, among others; and she has contributed to  critical compilations analyzing novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa María Britton.

Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century narratives of Latin America, Central  American literature, subaltern studies, memory and literature, the cultural production of  collective identities, the limits of representation through writing, literature and human rights,  ethics and representation, and theories of space and place. Teaching interests include  Spanish for heritage speakers, Latin American testimonio, the city in Latin American fiction,  literature of human rights in Latin America, historical fiction, and crafting Mayan identities.  AB, Harvard University; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. At Bard since 2004.

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Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope is a scholar, poet, editor, podcaster, and radio host. Essays, poems, reviews and other writings of his have appeared internationally in academic and non-academic journals. He is Editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (U of California Press), and q Founding Editor at Essay Press. Forthcoming publications include a book of poems, Bellerophonic Letters (Station Hill), and selections from an interlacing, many-titled, in-process work of poems entitled (variously) Conference of the Birds, Inference of the Voids, Deference of the Bards, A Protest of Pages, Ingresos du al Cello, errance a la foulce, Contested Offal, etc. Current writing projects include Pedagogy of the Depressed (essays) and Modern Problems, a critical reading of global Modernity’s deformed and disabled literatures (i.e. Modernism). He is an Associate Professor of Global Modernism in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and served as the initial Site Director, as well as a mentor and faculty member, for Bard Prison Initiative’s new Albion campus.

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Abby Crain

Abby Crain (she/her) is a dance artist who works through words, the body, and images in an attempt to make sense of the world, trouble what is considered sensible, and offer ways of seeing and being otherwise.  She was a professor in the Mills Dance Department on Ohlone land (Oakland, California) from 2016-2022 and currently teaches interdisciplinary writing at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her performance, choreographic, curatorial, and dance teaching work has been presented nationally and internationally; she co-organizes the Kathleen Hermesdorf FRESH Festival in San Francisco; and is the artistic director of the PORCH.Veranda program at Ponderosa Tanzland in Germany.

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Anna Dolan

Anna Dolan teaches FYSEM for the American University of Afghanistan and Documentary film
making at Parami University in Myanmar. She co-directs the Young Writers Workshop at Bard
College at Simon’s Rock. She has taught at universities on several continents. She is a
playwright, of funny/magical-realistic plays, has had over 60 produced plays, and works to make
theater in differing cultural contexts – including Ethiopia, Venezuela, Micronesia and Guatemala.

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Florian Duijsens

Florian Duijsens works as a translator and editor, and teaches at Bard College Berlin. Recently, he has also taught in the Young Writers Workshop at Simon’s Rock and at the Free University in Amsterdam. The co-founder and co-host of the Dead Ladies Show event series and podcast, he is also the senior editor of BLAU International and has moderated discussions at the International Literature Festival Berlin, LCB, and elsewhere. Aside from translating (children’s) books, he edits and translates work for artists, museums, and galleries around the world, and his writing and translations have appeared in Aperture, the Guardian, Asymptote, Ursula, and other publications.

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Ursula N. Embola

Born and raised in Cameroon (West/Central Africa), Ursula N. Embola has been living in New York since 1997. Ursula worked as a non-profit fundraiser for 17 years prior to becoming an academic, and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Buea (Cameroon), a Master of Arts in Writing from Manhattanville University, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Drew University. Ursula currently teaches at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, where she has been a faculty member in the Literature Department since 2019. Her research and teaching interests include the Art of the Essay, Cameroon’s Participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and Literatures of the African Diaspora.

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Paul Festa

Paul Festa’s essays appear in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, his poetry in Fauxmoir and Beyond Words. Before winning Lambda Literary's 2024 J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers over 50, his novel-in-progress MATERANO was short-listed for the CRAFT First Chapters Contest and the New Millennium Writing Awards. His critically acclaimed experimental documentaries include Apparition of the Eternal Church, about the music of Olivier Messiaen, and Tie It Into My Hand, a rhapsodic discussion of the artist’s life with Harold Bloom, Wayne Koestenbaum, Alan Cumming, Margaret Cho, and Robert Pinsky. His performance installation Night of a Thousand Agneses, starring founding Sister of Perpetual Indulgence Agnes de Garron, was nominated for the Berlin Arts Prize. His sculpture has shown in Berlin at BauStelle and Pandora Art Gallery, and his photography appears in RFD and Beyond Words. As violinist, he has performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and the Library of Congress, and in his award-winning silent-film comedy The Glitter Emergency. Paul has taught courses at Bard College Berlin in literature, philosophy, video production, fiction writing, modern Italian history, and music history.

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Ethan Fortuna

Ethan Fortuna is a trans writer, visual artist, and educator. His first full-length poetry collection, body of the bather, is forthcoming with Antiphony Press in 2028. Work can be found in Chicago Review, Blue Bag Press, Black Sun Lit and elsewhere; more at ethanfortuna.com.

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Xhosa Frazier MAT '10

Xhosa Frazier graduated from the Bard MAT program in 2010. He currently teaches English 101 through SUNY Ulster Community college at the Woodstock Day School, as well as middle school and high school ELA. He taught a course titled “Poetry and the Spoken Word”, and he also taught a course titled “Alice Walker's The Color Purple and the African American Vernacular” in the Bard Early College Summer Academy. He has been a mentor teacher for the Bard MAT program for the past six years, which focuses on the process of teaching aspiring teachers how to teach. This is his 6th year teaching in the Language & Thinking program. 
Along with his teaching, Xhosa also writes essays and poetry. His poems and essays have been published in Hunger magazine and Forward. His current research is focused on the poetry and critical essays of Louis Zukofsky, and more specifically, Xhosa is exploring the cultural and theoretical influence Zukofsky has had on the development of his own work as a poet. 

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C Gómez-Montoya

I am a writer, translator and artist working with different languages,  printmaking techniques, and translation practices. I have taught at  various Bard programs and partnerships, including Bard High School  Early College, Writing Knowledge, Young Writer's Workshop, and  Language & Thinking. I live, write, translate and print in Paris.

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Seth David Halvorson

Seth David Halvorson’s (B.A., Macalester College; M.A., Stanford University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University) interests include Political, Ethical, and Social Philosophy, Policy Analysis, Classical and Contemporary Theories of Democracy and Citizenship, and History of Technology. He currently is Professor of History, Philosophy, and Political Studies at BHSEC-Newark. Seth has been a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University and has taught, directed programs, and held appointments in Philosophy and Argumentation at Stanford and the University of Iowa. While he taught undergraduates in Columbia's Core Curriculum, he pursued the practical side of his interest in technology and for four years was Project Manager for Digital Humanities Teaching and Scholarship. Halvorson has been repeatedly recognized for excellence in Undergraduate teaching and has presented at national and international conferences on diverse topics in Philosophy, Education, Ethics, History, and Politics. Prior to his graduate education, Seth spent 3 years at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. His recent work has focused on the use of ethico-ecological vocabularies in the Anthropocene. He is undertaking a book-length study of the civic, moral, and educative dimensions of speed in the spheres of American social life. In his spare time he paints and is learning how to play the banjo. Seth and his spouse Heather, a practicing Modern Psychoanalyst, live in Newark, NJ and are preparing for the birth of their daughter. 

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Kythe Heller

Kythe Heller is an award-winning poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar of philosophy and religion whose work moves across contemplative studies, phenomenology, poetics, and the intersection of artistic and spiritual practice. Her research and creative work are particularly concerned with sound, the phenomenology of the senses, and the transmission of knowledge across aesthetic, philosophical, and contemplative traditions. Her comparative work in religion engages the traditions of Sufism, South American Indigenous thought, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, bringing these into dialogue through both scholarly and artistic forms. She holds a ThD/PhD from Harvard University in the Study of Religion (Comparative Studies in Religion and Religious Thought), with a secondary doctoral field in Literary Arts, Film, and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice; an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School; an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College; and a BA in English Literature from Reed College.

Her recent books include Firebird (Arrowsmith Press), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra (Stenen Press, co-edited with Carolina Gómez-Montoya), bronze winner of the Independent Press Book Award—an anthology of literary translations, essays, and visual art that reimagines translation as a reciprocal, care-centered, and decolonial practice. Her intermedia collaborations include Thunder Perfect Mind (with photographer Meka Tome) and Rite of Spring (with Meghan McNealy), works that bring poetic language into dialogue with image, movement, and ritual form. Her critical scholarship has appeared in Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press), Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and the Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal, among others, with poetry and essays in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and elsewhere. Her scholarly work engages medieval and contemporary mysticism, animism, phenomenology of the senses, apophatic inquiry, socially engaged arts, ecological aesthetics, and the contemplative dimensions of poetic and artistic form.

She has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (in support of a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony), the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, supporting residencies at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her film, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited at festivals across the United States and Canada. Heller is the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, an international community founded at Harvard Divinity School, bringing together artists, scholars, and contemplative practitioners in sustained inquiry across artistic practice, scholarship, and contemplative life. She is a faculty member of Bard College’s Language and Thinking Program and edits the international art and culture journal Forecast. See kytheheller.com.
 

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Jim Keller

Jim Keller, PhD

Jim Keller directs the Bard College Learning Commons, home to the writing program and Bard’s tutor support, learning strategies, and writing center. Jim’s research and publication subjects include twentieth century philosophies of language, perception, pedagogy, and cognition. Jim teaches courses in the philosophy of embodied mind, composition theory, and engaged pedagogy. He has taught across a number of subjects: writing courses at The University of Montana; classes in college writing, graphic narrative, social and popular-cultural rhetoric, philosophy, American studies, and American literature at Bard College, the State University of New York (at Stony Brook), and the University of Iowa. He has taught in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and American Studies departments at Michigan State University and led summer writing workshops in Bard's Language and Thinking Program from 2001 to the present and at Lewis and Clark College. Jim has worked as a faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking since 2005 and has co-edited Writing from the Inside Out, a journal showcasing writing by participants in Institute workshops. His book, Writing Plural Worlds (Palgrave/MacMillan 2009) provides a study of philosophical pluralism in multiethnic U.S. poetry (1965-1975), and his articles have appeared in Poetry and Pedagogy, Theorizing the “Middle Generation,” and other publications on pedagogy and twentieth century literature and philosophy. Jim has presented papers to MLA, MELUS, and most recently the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and CCCC conferences.

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Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss

Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss, (B.A., New School for Social Research; M.A., Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research (Sociology/Historical Studies); Certification, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Training and Research Institute for Self-Psychology; Psy.D. (Critical Theory/Organizational Psychology), Wright Institute/Professional School of Psychology, 2012; Fellow in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, The Karen Horney Clinic/American Institute of Psychoanalysis, Practitioner Certification Mentalization-Based Treatment, Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute, (McLean Hospital); Transference Focused Psychotherapy, (Columbia University); founding director, Terezin Publishing Project; general editor/originating publisher, English-Language edition of H. G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community (Cambridge University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Terezin Publishing Project, 2018, National Book Award nominee, National Jewish Book Award finalist). Articles have appeared in such publications as The Journal of the International Political Science Association, International Journal of Political Psychology and Political Socialization, The New York Times, The Prague Post, and TIKKUN Magazine and the Library of Professional Psychology. Songs in the Wilderness: Music in the Holocaust and the Betrayal of ‘Bildung’ (forthcoming from Berghahn Books). Former Board Member, Partners for Progressive Israel (MeretzUSA). International Society for Political Psychology; International Psychohistorical Association; Training and Research in Interrelational Self Psychology Foundation. Recipient of grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Lowe Wood Foundation, among others. Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, concert/lecture series, Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism. Bard College: Language and Thinking faculty since 2011; Citizen Science, faculty; Bard Prison Initiative, faculty, Public Health Concentration, Psychodynamic Studies; Bard High School Early College; Open Society University Network.

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Bill Martin

Bill Martin is a Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking Associate and has been facilitating Language & Thinking workshops since 2007. He has also taught for Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine, where he headed the Literature and Society program 2017–2019, and in the Common Core and the German Department at both Colgate University and The University of Chicago. Currently he teaches in Pratt Institute’s program in Berlin, where he lives. He is a literary translator from German and Polish and has recently translated Michał Witkowski’s novel Eleven Inch (Seagull, 2021) and Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (Fitzcarraldo, forthcoming).

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Emma Murdock

Emma McMahon Murdock is a fiction writer and English/writing adjunct from Brooklyn. They teach courses on grammar, literature, writing, and pedagogy for the Bard Prison Initiative and at Hunter College. They hold a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in fiction from Columbia School of the Arts.

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Jamal Neal

Jamal Davis Neal, Jr. (He/They)
Jamal is a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School and UConn School of Social Work where they
graduated with a Master of Divinity in 2024 and Master’s of Social Work in 2022 as a part of
their joint-degree program.

He first taught at Bard for Citizen Science during Winter Intercession 2024 and looks forward to
teaching CitSci again this coming academic year. However, this will be their first-time teaching
L&T and they’re looking forward to developing relationships with new students as they figure
out their independent and autonomous lives in this time and space beyond high school and other
pre-Bard commitments.

Outside of Bard, Jamal is looking to practice psychotherapy as an LMSW in the nearby area and
looks forward to their coming ordination as a minister in the American Baptist Churches USA.

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Antonio Ortiz ’18

Antonio Ortiz is a Visiting Instructor in the Humanities at Bard College, teaching Language and Thinking (L&T) and First Year Seminar (FYSEM). Antonio graduated from Bard College in 2018 with a BA in Economics, specializing in macroeconomic policy and the economic history of Latin America. After graduating from Bard, he attended Yale Divinity School where he earned his Master of Divinity degree in 2023. During his time at Yale, Antonio's research focused on the Hebrew Bible; in particular, how biblical narratives of violence were used to construct communal identity in ancient Israel, and surrounding ancient West Asian cultures. In addition to his teaching role, Antonio is also a Program Associate in the Office of the Dean of the College, working directly with the Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean of the College, Nicholas Alton Lewis, on building a climate of inclusion and community at Bard College. Outside of academia, Antonio is a practicing Buddhist, and an avid soccer fan.

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Jillian Peña

Jillian Peña is a Latinx dance and video artist whose work seeks to make visible the
confusion and desire between self and other. Her work is in dialogue with
psychoanalysis, queer theory, pop media, and spirituality. Jillian received a 2016 Bessie
Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in New York and was
awarded the 2014 Prix Jardin d'Europe, the European Prize for Outstanding Emerging
Choreography at ImpulsTanz Dance Festival in Vienna. Her videos have screened in
over 13 countries, and her live performance has been presented internationally,
including at Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, 92nd St Y, Dance Theater
Workshop and The Kitchen in New York, and at ImPulsTanz Vienna, Modern Art Oxford,
Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Sophiensaele Berlin, and the International
Festival of Contemporary Art Slovenia. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Lower
Manhattan Cultural Center, PS122, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research, the
National Dance Center of Bucharest, and Archauz Denmark. Jillian has created work for
American Ballet Theater, American Dance Festival's Footprints Program, and the
University of the Arts. She was a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar during which she
was awarded an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a fellowship
recipient, and a Practice-based MPhil at Goldsmiths University.

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Andrea Quaid

Andrea Quaid (she/her) is a writer, editor and teacher. Her work focuses on poetry and poetics, pedagogy, and feminist studies. She is co-editor of the publication and ongoing pedagogy project, Migrating Pedagogies. A new press project, Migrating Pedagogies, an anthology, is forthcoming (np: 2027). She is also co-editor of Acts + Encounters, a collection about experimental writing and community, and Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics and Emergent Pedagogies. Her work appears or is forthcoming in albeit, American Book Review, Annulet, BOMBlog, Entropy, Feminist Art Practice and Research: Cosmos, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Spaces Journal, Full Stop, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT, Los Angeles Review of Books, Manifold, Syllabus, and University of Toronto Quarterly: Writing and Social Justices: Praxis, Aesthetics, Pedagogies.In addition to teaching in the Bard College Language & Thinking Program and Institute for Writing and Thinking, Andrea teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. (B.A., M.F.A., Antioch University, Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz.)

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David Richardson

David Richardson is a writer, editor, and teacher. He co-directs Dispersed Holdings, a small press. He has taught writing and pedagogy for the Bard Prison Initiative since 2021, and he is a Faculty Associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.

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Suzanne Schulz 

Suzanne’s videos and essays deal with practices of everyday life, hidden  histories of place, solidarities across difference, and gendered labor. Her  art is informed by her work as an educator at Bard High School Early  College Queens and her time as a scholar, which taught her to grasp new  languages, to comb archives, and to read closely. Suzanne earned a  Master’s in South Asian Studies and a PhD in Radio-Television-Film from  UT-Austin. Suzanne recently received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts  from Hunter College-CUNY. Her thesis film, The I Need More Time  Machine, was supported by a Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice.

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Miles Strucker

Miles Strucker is a fiction writer and educator whose work explores the relationship between nature and the imagination. He teaches First-Year Seminar in the Bard Early College program and a course at Parsons School of Design called Constructed Environments. He has previously taught at Columbia University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Meredith College.

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Wally Suphap

Wally Suphap (he/they) is a nonfiction writer, lawyer, editor, translator, and
educator. They are the author of Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an
Incident (Fish Publishing, 2022), a hybrid-mode short memoir examining the
intersectionality of queerness, masculinity, and power, selected as the overall
winner of the Fish Short Memoir Prize. They also received named placements
in the Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Contest, CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest,
and Globe Soup Short Memoir Contest. They were awarded fellowships and
residencies from Anaphora Literary Arts, Asian American Writers’ Workshop,
Hudson Valley Writers Center, Kenyon Review, Tin House Summer Workshop,
and Yale Writers’ Workshop. Their writings have appeared in Assay: A Journal
of Nonfiction, Columbia Journal, Fish Anthology, New Writing: The
International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Journal
of Creative Writing Studies, The Margins, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere.
Their translation work covering Southeast Asian literature has been supported
by the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press. They are the
founding editor of The Plentitudes literary magazine, and formerly served on
the editorial staff at Columbia Journal and Creative Nonfiction. Originally from
Bangkok and raised in Los Angeles, they hold a BA, JD, and MFA from
Columbia University. Prior to transitioning to a career as a writer-teacher, they
practiced corporate law as a dual qualified New York attorney and Hong Kong
solicitor. At Columbia, they have taught undergraduate writing, legal writing,
creative nonfiction, and journalism, along with serving as a part-time writing
consultant at the University Writing Center. They currently reside in New York
City.

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Robin Tremblay-McGaw is an artist who works with image +text, and a writer of poems, essays, and critical articles. She is Teaching Professor at Santa Clara University and a Faculty Associate at Bard College. She is a 2025 Justice Equity and Inclusion (JEDI) grant recipient for Some Chorus: Benjamin Moore’s White and a 2020 Santa Clara University Center for the Arts & Humanities Fellow. She was in residence at Yaddo in Fall 2025. Robin is the author of after a grand collage (Dyad Press 1996), making mARKs (a+bend press 2000), Dear Reader (Ithuriel’s Spear, 2015), and co-authored with Rob Halpern, From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (2017) and a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory on New Narrative (Fall 2021). Robin will have an exhibit of the hybrid image + text work in April 2026 at Artists Television Networks’ Right Window Gallery in San Francisco. Her image+text piece, “Audubon in Haiti.” appeared in Superpresent, Fall 2025. Her writing has appeared in Tripwire, MELUS, Aufgabe, Crayon, Sillages Critique, On Contemporary Practice, Feminist Spaces 2.2, JNT, and elsewhere. Poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Three Fold Press Magazine, Fetch, Issue 2. Dogpark Collective, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. From 2008-2017, Robin edited the Bay Area poetry blog xpoetics.blogspot.com. 

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David Ungvary

A.B., Duke University; M.St., University of Oxford; Ph.D., Harvard University. Professor Ungvary is a Latinist whose research centers on intersections among religion, literature, and other practices of self-formation from the Late Roman period through the Early Middle Ages, c. 300-800 CE. His first book, Converting Verse: The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He is presently at work on a translation of the complete writings of Eugenius of Toledo, a prolific poet of seventh-century Visigothic Spain whose verses have never been rendered into English. Other published and forthcoming work investigates the histories of penance, vows of silence, and patronage in Late Antiquity. He teaches courses in Classical Studies, Literature, Philosophy, History, and Religion on the Annandale campus and regularly with BPI. At Bard since 2018.

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Christopher Wall

Christopher Wall (A.B. Dartmouth, M.A. Boston University, M.F.A. New York University) is a playwright, essayist, and lyricist. He was commissioned in 2017 by New World Symphony (Michael Tilson-Thomas, artistic director) to write a mixed-genre play with music. The result, an exploration of what it is like to live with PTSD, was produced this year. His play Dreams of the Washer King premiered Off Broadway at the Playwrights Realm and was subsequently produced in LA. His other plays have been seen or produced at Northern Stage, Round House, HotCity, Source Theatre, Kitchen Dog, Abingdon, Dartmouth, Fairfield University, and at other theaters. Songs from his chamber musical, The God of In-Between, co-written with Howard Fishman, have been performed at Joe’s Pub, Subculture, and other venues in New York City. He has been in residence at SPACE on Ryder Farm and the Vermont Studio Center, and was a fellow at the Norman Mailer Center, where he pursued his other love, nonfiction. His essays have appeared in Longform, LA Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, and other magazines. Three of his works have been cited as a Notable Essay of the Year in the Best American Essays anthology. He appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show, where he was interviewed by Phillip Lopate and read an excerpt from his prizewinning essay “The Size of the Room.” In 2017 he presented a paper at CCCC based on the innovative pedagogy he developed at Tisch to help students grapple with complexity by analyzing the same stories across different mediums. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

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Peter Wallace

I was Chair of the Theater Program at Eugene Lang College at the New School University in New York City for many years, where I taught all aspects of theater. I have taught at a number of other universities, as well as been a theater director around the United States. I got my MFA in Directing at Yale School of Drama. I have written and sold screenplays, written and produced plays. I have taught workshops for the Institute of Writing and Thinking in Myanmar, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, and have also been on the Language and Thinking faculty at Bard College. My first novel, Speaker, was published in 2020. My second novel, Lifeline, (unpublished) is based on my four years volunteering on the suicide hotline. After Lang College, I founded a shared studio and gallery space for visual artists called Brooklyn Artists Gym, in part to support my art habit. Hundreds of artists came through over the course of seven years. I have been a fisherman, a motorcycle bum, an interfaith minister, a sculptor and a bodywork therapist. I now live in Portland, Oregon, where I write and teach.

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Mary Grace Williams

The Rev. Mary Grace Williams, Chaplain of the College/Dean of Community life, Visiting Instructor in the Humanities and Vicar of The Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, Barrytown, NY, came to Bard in 2016 and has taught FYSEM every semester since the 2018 spring semester as well as other courses in religion and the Bible. She received her B.A. from Rutgers University where she studied theater arts, which led her to move to New York City directly after college to pursue a career in theater. While living in the West Village, she rediscovered her deep interest in spirituality and religion and that inspired her to do a M.A. in religious education from Fordham University. Eventually this led her to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest, and she attended Yale Divinity School, where she earned a M.Div. Mary Grace has two daughters: Grace, who is currently in Pediatric Residency at Cohen Children’s Medical Center, Queens, NY, and Kate who graduated from Bard in 2020 as a double major in human rights and dance and who now lives in NYC performing and designing and creating clothing. Mary Grace lives in Rhinebeck and has two Cavalier King Charles dogs (George, and Charles) and is excited to be part of the faculty for L&T and FYSEM where she gets to work closely with first year students

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Mike Wood MAT ’15

Mike Wood, MA English, King’s College London, MAT (Literature), Bard College. Mike has taught in private and public schools in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Prior to this role he was an Associate Director of Admission in Bard College’s Office of Admission. In addition to serving as the Dean of Students, Mike also teaches a section of the program’s College Experience class, guiding students as they navigate the college application process. Outside of work, Mike’s interests include drumming, piano, softball, and volleyball. He is married with two daughters.

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Joseph Yearous-Algozin

Joey Yearous-Algozin is a poet, publisher and teacher. He is the author of A Feeling
Called Heaven, Utopia, and the multi-volume The Lazarus Project, among others. With
Holly Melgard, he co-authored the trilogy of books: Liquidation, White Trash, and Holly
Melgard’s Friends and Family. He is a founding member of the publishing collective,
Troll Thread. With an MA in Creative Writing from Temple University and a PhD in
English from the University at Buffalo, he teaches in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program and
is a writing consultant at Baruch College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.