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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Miriam Atkin

Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based poet. Her creative practice has been largely concerned with the possibilities of poetry as a medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music and dance, and has lately extended to the co-founding of Pinsapo, a publishing collective of international artists across disciplines. She has contributed essays, reviews, interviews and poems to Art in America, Art Handler, Haunt Journal, Caesura,The Recluse and elsewhere. She was a 2014 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She holds an MFA in art criticism from School of Visual Arts and a PhD in English literature from CUNY Graduate Center. 

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Jonathon Atkinson

I’m a writer and a teacher. My fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in outlets including Public Books, Rain Taxi, Asymptote, New Ohio Review, and Bright Wall / Dark Room. I’ve taught elementary school students (at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School), high school students (at the Athenian School, in Northern California), and college students (at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities). For almost a decade I’ve worked as a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. I received my B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied English literature and philosophy, and my M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where I focused on fiction writing.

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Andrew K. Atwell

PhD (University of Chicago)
Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bard College. 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. He also received doctoral training and an MA in physics at the University of Virginia where he worked on the CMS Experiment’s search for supersymmetric decay modes and dark matter candidates at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. This combination of scholarship drives a particular interest in intersections of social and physical sciences. His research has been supported by the Wenner- Gren Foundation, a Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies, and the University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

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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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John Burns

John Burns is an educator, poet, translator, and the author of Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age (Cambria Press, 2015). He has also authored several book chapters and articles on experimental Latin American poetry, cinema, and culture. His publications also include translations—of the Peruvian poet Jorge Pimentel, Chilean poet Raúl Hernández and Galician poet Salvador García-Bodaño, as well as translations of the Beat poets into Spanish—and his own creative work. He previously taught at Bard High School Early College Queens, Rockford University in Illinois, and Kobe College in Japan, where he served as Visiting Researcher. At Bard since 2019.

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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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Bill Dixon

Bill Dixon is a political theorist (PhD. Johns Hopkins University) and Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Politics Program at Bard College, where he also teaches First Year Seminar and
in the Bard Prison Initiative. He served as director of the Bard College Language and Thinking
Program from 2016-2024. He has also taught political science courses at Johns Hopkins and
Oberlin College. His current research interests include cosmopolitanism, democratic theory,
American politics, and climate policy. Some of the political thinkers who interest him most
include Thucydides, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Walt
Whitman, Hannah Arendt, and Sheldon Wolin. In the Fall Semester in 2024 he will be teaching
seminars on “The Modern American Presidency” and “Civic Knowledge and Social Change.”

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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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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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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

Carolina Gómez Montoya (MA and PhD in Latin American and Peninsular Literature, University of Maryland) has taught at various Bard programs and partnerships, including Bard High School Early College, the Writing Knowledge Program and the Language and Thinking Program. Carolina is co-editor of an upcoming poetry anthology for Stenen Press and will soon be joining the faculty at the Young Writer’s Workshop at Simon’s Rock. Carolina’s writing appears in Literal: Latin American Voices/Voces Latinoamericanas; ¡Basta! Mujeres colombianas contra la violencia de género (Bogotá: Debate escrito, 2015) and in Oregon Humanities magazine. In September, Carolina is moving to Paris to pursue a creative writing program at Université Paris 8. 

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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. She earned a ThD/PhD at Harvard University in Comparative Studies in Religion, with a PhD secondary field in Literary Arts, Film, and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice. Previously, she received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English Literature from Reed College.

Recently published work includes a collection of poems, Firebird (Arrowsmith), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, an edited collection of literary translations, essays, and visual art, The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow/El alma se mueve en la sombra (Stenen Press, co-edited with Carolina Gómez-Montoya), winner of the Independent Press Book Awards, writing and intermedia works including Thunder Perfect Mind (with photographer Meka Tome) and Rite of Spring (with Meghan McNealy), and several critical studies of medieval and contemporary mysticism and spirituality, phenomenology of the senses, poetics, and socially-engaged arts, 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), “The Heart Receptive of Every Form: Representations of Fire in the unio mystica of Mahomet (Mi’raj-Nameh (1436) Manuscript)” (Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal), and poetry and essays in The American Poetry Review, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, The Southern Review, and others.. She has received fellowships and grant awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to support a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Film, music, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited at festivals in the United States and Canada.

She is also the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, a global art and research collective based at Harvard Divinity School and creating work to address contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, and technology. She edits the international art and culture journal Forecast, and is a faculty member of Bard College's Language and Thinking Program.

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Jim Keller

Jim Keller, PhD (B.A. University of California at Berkeley; PhD SUNY Stony Brook) is Continuing Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard and directs the Bard College Learning Commons – Bard’s tutor support and writing center, college writing courses, learning strategies, etc. His research, teaching, and publication interests include twentieth century philosophies of language, perception, and cognition. Jim teaches courses in the philosophy of embodied learning and engaged composition theory and pedagogy. He has taught literature and writing courses at The University of Montana and classes in college writing, graphic narrative, social and popular-cultural rhetoric, philosophy, American studies, and American literature at the State University of New York (at Stony Brook and Sullivan), the University of Iowa, Michigan State University, and Bard College. He taught in Bard's Language and Thinking Program from 2001 to 2010 and the Fir Acres summer writing workshop at Lewis and Clark College. Jim has been 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) studies philosophical pluralism and social activism in multiethnic U.S. literature, and his published articles have appeared in Poetry and Pedagogy, The Middle Generation in 20th Century US Literature, and other publications on twentieth century literature and philosophy. Jim recently presented with Erica Kaufman and two tutor-graduates at the conference for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) on “Embodied Cognition, Learning Center Innovations, And ‘Revolution in Thinking about Thinking’” (2022).

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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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Andrew McCarron '98

Andrew McCarron is a teacher and writer born and raised in the Hudson River Valley. He holds a
Ph.D. in Psychology, chairs the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics Department at Trinity School in
Manhattan, and teaches in the English Department. His books include: Mysterium, a poetry collection (Edgewise Press, 2011); Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle & Paul Violi, a collection of critical biographies (Station Hill, 2016); Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan, a study of the Nobel Laureate’s religious identities (Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Ballad of Sara and Thor: A Novella (Station Hill, 2017). In addition to teaching and writing, Andrew has also served on the ethics committee of New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

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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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Leonard Nalencz

Leonard Nalencz works as an educator, a writer/ translator, and an activist. He is an Associate Professor of  English at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, and he  teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative. He writes about  poetry, and has recently translated and edited Let’s Walk  Together, a trilingual—Quechua, Spanish, and English— anthology of stories and poems. His work in attention  activism runs throughout his teaching and writing, and is  focused on the work of two institutions, the Strother  School of Radical Attention and the Strother Center  for the Examined Life.

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Jamal Davis Neal, Jr.

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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Joel Newberger

Joel Newberger is a poet and teacher who lives in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of several
books of poetry, including Hexateuch, Under the Window, and In Titan’s Goblet. He is the editor and publisher of The Swan, and an editor of New Books. He recently received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

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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 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. 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 in albeit, American Book Review, Annulet, BOMBlog, Entropy, Feminist Spaces Journal, Full Stop, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT, Los Angeles Review of Books, Manifold and Syllabus. She co-curates RAD! Residencies at the Poetic Research Bureau. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts. She also teaches in the Bard College Language & Thinking Program and Institute for Writing and Thinking. (University of California, Santa Cruz, Literature PhD., Antioch University, MFA in Creative Writing)

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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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Suzanne Schulz '98

Suzanne lives in Queens, NYC and is a professor at Bard High School Early College Queens, where she teaches courses on experimental film, documentary media, and South Asian cinema. Suzanne holds a Master’s degree in South Asian Languages and Cultures and a PhD in Radio-Television Film from UT-Austin. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation and was recently a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Fellow at the Library of Congress. Suzanne is currently an MFA candidate in the Integrated Media Arts at CUNY-Hunter College. Her videos, which explore debt, reconciliation, friendship, and work have screened at Rooftop films, Hunter College, and at the University Film and Video Association.

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Miles Strucker

Miles Strucker is a fiction writer interested in creating a dialogue between the sciences
and the humanities. He teaches a first-year seminar on design history and theory at Parsons
School of Design, and has previously taught writing at Columbia University, SUNY FIT, 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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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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Sarah Wheeler

Sarah Wheeler has been a teacher for 25 years and is currently English Department Chair at Rhinebeck High School in Rhinebeck, NY.  She studied French and Italian literature at Columbia College, Columbia University, receiving a BA magna cum laude.  She holds an MS in Education from The George Washington University with a specialization in English as a New Language, as well as an MA in English from SUNY New Paltz.  Sarah taught high school English in Annandale, VA, Norfolk, VA, and Bensonhurst, NY, before moving to the Hudson River Valley.  She also served as adjunct faculty in writing programs at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, NJ, SUNY New Paltz, and Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY, where she gained experience supporting students in the transition from high school to college.  Sarah advises both the student newspaper Rhinebeck Reality and literary magazine Murmur, and she coaches students in RHS’s annual Poetry Out Loud competitions.  Her writing has been published in TESOL’s What Works, The Shawangunk Review, NCTE’s College Composition and Communication, and Living Rhinebeck, but her true passion is the performance art created in classroom collaboration with young minds and big ideas.

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Mary Grace Williams

The Rev. Mary Grace Williams, Chaplain of the College and Dean of Community Life, 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 medical school in NYC, and Kate who graduated from Bard in 2020 as a double major in human rights and dance and who now lives in Brooklyn performing and designing and creating clothing. Mary Grace lives in Rhinebeck and has three Cavalier King Charles dogs (Harry, George, and Charles).

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Mike Wood MAT '15

Mike Wood M.A. English, King’s College London, M.A.T. (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.