Language and Thinking Faculty

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Susan Aberth

Susan Aberth (B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Ph.D., The Graduate Center, CUNY) is an Associate Professor in the Art History Program at Bard College. Her specialties include Latin American Art, Surrealism, Outsider Art and Esotericism and she is particularly interested in women surrealists working in the Americas. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries and Turnerin Spanish), she has contributed essays to Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos Mágicos, (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018); Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the international avant-garde (Manchester University Press, 2017) as well as articles in Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror (London), and Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She is currently working on a book that explores the role of trance mediums in the formation of modern art, particularly in the United States (working title:Channeled Visions: Mediums and Modern Art). 

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Alexis Almeida

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. Her recent poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Gulf Coast, Folder, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. Her long poem, I Have Never Been Able to Sing, is forthcoming from Ugly Ducking Presse, and her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Wreckage is just out from Toad Press. Her translation of Marina Yuszczuk's Single Mother is forthcoming from Spork Press, and her translation of Dalia Rosetti's Dreams and Nightmares is forthcoming from Les Figues. She is the recent recipient of a Fulbright research fellowship to Argentina, and has received awards and residencies from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, the Center for Book Arts, Bread Loaf, and the Banff Center. She has served on the editorial board of Asymptote and The Elephants, and is currently putting together, with many other translators, an anthology of contemporary female poets living in Argentina. She lives in Providence, where she teaches and makes broadsides for 18 Owls Press. 

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Rashaun J. Allen

Rashaun J. Allen holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from SUNY Stony Brook and is the first Fulbright scholar in the program’s history. He has independently published poetry chapbooks: A Walk Through Brooklyn and In The Moment. He has been published in TSR: The Southampton Review, Tishman Review, Rigorous, and Auburn Avenue. When not writing or thinking about writing, he runs to scream at the top of his lungs the moment he crosses the finish line. Find more of his work at 

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Tim Casey

Tim Casey (B.F.A., M.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design). Painter; has had solo exhibitions in New York City at Pratt Gallery, Gabrielle Bryers Gallery, The Clocktower, and Tomoko Liguori Gallery, and at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. Has also exhibited at Artists' Space, New York City; Margulies-Taplin Gallery, Miami; Lesley Heller Gallery, New York City; and Pierogi Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, and Momenta Gallery in Brooklyn. Reviews in Arts Magazine, Art in America, New York Times. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Jewish Museum, and other public and private collections. He teaches Visual Art and First Year Seminar at Bard High School Early College, and has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Tufts University, SUNY Purchase, New York University, Pratt Institute, and Middlebury College. Participant, Yale Writers Conference, 2012. 

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Nicole Caso

A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Professor Caso's areas of specialty 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; and she has contributed to critical compilations analyzing novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa María Britton. At Bard since 2004. 

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Rajnesh Chakrapani

Raj Chakrapani lived in Myanmar as a teacher for the US Department of State and served as Peace Corps Volunteer in Romania and Liberia. He received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At Iowa he wrote his collection of poems Brown People with Colonial Histories and his MFA thesis on Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene. He also took classes in experimental film and translation. He recently completed a series of short films that explore his family video archives and communities with shifting perspectives of home. His poems are placed or forthcoming in Lana Turner, Speculative City, Word Thug, Sequestrum and http://Crevice.ro. The first part of his trilogy of films will be published on Triquarterly this summer and the rest are available on youtube. He writes interviews for The Rumpus and recently interviewed the novelist SJ Sindu.

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Maria Chaves

Maria Paula Chaves Daza is a Latinx feminist scholar, holds a Master in Philosophy from the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture program, and is Doctorate in English from the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at SUNY-Binghamton University. Born in Colombia, they had the privilege to live in large immigrant cities like Miami and Chicago. These immigrant communities and the matriarchs of their family have given them the perspective and exposure to quotidian feminist practices which inspire their scholarly and community work. Their scholarship is invested in listening to the many ways women of color tell stories and work towards social justice. Their areas of specialization are 20^thCentury Chicanx/Latinx Literature, Women of Color Feminist Literature/Theory, Transnationalism, Testimonio, Post-colonial/De-colonial Theory.

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Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope (B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) teaches English and Comparative Literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, where he is an Assistant Professor specializing in Global Modernisms. His recent critical writing has appeared in The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry and essays on the refusal of work in James Joyce’s fiction and the erotics and politics of reading engendered by Gertrude Stein’s “fiction” are forthcoming. Cope’s critical edition of the previously unpublished and uncollected writings of George Oppen was published by the University of California Press as George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, and he is the host of Conference of the Birds (http://confbirds.blogspot.com), an internationally celebrated weekly radio program and podcast of "classical, folk, demotic, art, and experimental musics from Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, the Americas, Europe and places between and beyond.” Cope was a founding editor, with Catherine Taylor and Eula Biss, of Essay Press, the first publishing imprint to focus on book-length experimental and lyric essays. In addition to his work in traditional academic settings, Cope has taught in the Bard Prison Initiative, and he is a faculty sponsor of Hobart and William Smith's Second Chances prison education program in Western New York. His book project, Modern Problems, addresses the cultural politics of literary form in experimental, global Modernisms. “Conference of the Birds,” his ongoing series of poems, emerges from a critical and creative engagement with the music featured on his podcast. Cope has served on the faculty of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program since 2007.

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Anna Dolan

Anna Dolan (M.F.A., playwriting, Yale University; M.F.A., directing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) teaches Playwriting in the Creative Writing Program and the English Department at Central Connecticut State University. She also teaches in the Young Writers' Workshop at Fir Acres and Bard College at Simon's Rock. She is a playwright and has written (and had produced) over 30 plays. She has recently written a recitation/adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" for Maloney Theater in New Britain Connecticut, and an adaptation of "Men in the Sun" for the Freedom Theater of Jenin in Palestine. She received a grant from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community to write and direct two plays for the Sokhes Theater of Pohnpei in Micronesia-FSM, where she taught at the College of Micronesia-FSM for two years.

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Brittney Edmonds

Brittney Edmonds is a writer and scholar of African-American literature and theory. She earned her B.A. from Cornell University where she studied as a Meinig Family Cornell National Scholar.  She is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and will earn her degree in September 2018 in English Literature with certificates in Gender and Sexuality Studies and African-American Studies. She has taught at Cornell University, Princeton University, Mercer Community College, and Bard College. She is currently a literature faculty member at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan. Her writing has appeared in MELUS and a forthcoming anthology on African-American culture. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Ursula N. Embola

Originally from the Republic of Cameroon in West/Central Africa, Ursula N. Embola has been living in the United States since 1997. Ursula worked as a non-profit fundraiser for 17 years prior to becoming an academic. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Buea, a Master of Arts in Writing from Manhattanville College, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Drew University. Ursula currently teaches English and Writing at Mercy College and Westchester Community College. Her research interests include the connections between West African and African American women writers of the 20th Century.

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Jennifer Eyl

Jennifer Eyl (B.A. University of Georgia; Ph.D. Brown University) is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Tufts University. She works on early Christianity, ancient Mediterranean religions, and theory of religion. She has published articles in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, and chapters in various books. Her forthcoming book, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the practices of divination and wonderworking in the letters of the apostle Paul, and contextualizes such practices within ancient ideas about human reciprocity with gods. She is also co-editor of Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation (Bloomsbury, 2018). In her spare time she builds things, rides bikes, and grows a big urban garden.

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Natalia Fedorova

Natalia Fedorova is a new media poet, a digital literature scholar and a 101.Mediapoetry Festival curator. In collaboration with a sonic artist Taras Mashtalir she founded a media poetry project Machine Libertine. Noor, a brain opera with her libretto was presented at ISEA, 2016. Her audio and video poems appeared in TextSound, Rattapallax, LIT magazine, and Ill-Tempered Rubyist, räume für notizen | rooms for notes as well as number of international festivals and biennales (ISEA 2016, ELO 2015, 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 10, Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair, REVERSE, Moscow Book Festival, E-Poetry, LUMEN EX, Interrupt II, VideoBardo, Liberated Words, Tarp and others). Natalia holds a PhD in literary theory from Herzen State University (St-Petersburg). Natalia won a Fulbright scholarship to do her first year postdoctorate term at the Trope Tank at MIT, where she was working on translating e-lit, and SPIRE to develop Russian Electronic Literature Collection in a specialized knowledge base at the University of Bergen for her second year term. She is currently teaching creative writing with new media and text-based art in Smolny College (St-Petersburg State University – Bard College) and curating a Mediapoetry lab at the New Stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre. Natalia is a member of editorial board of Translit an almanach for contemporary poetry.

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Xhosa Frazier 

Xhosa Frazier graduated from the Bard MAT program in 2010, where he currently serves as a mentor teacher. His current research focuses on the works of Paul Celan, Louis Zukofsky, Joseph Roth, and Delmore Schwartz. He has been teaching and writing in the Hudson Valley since 2002. He has read in and organized numerous poetry readings from New York City to Albany for over twenty-five years. He has also taught poetry workshops at Sullivan County prison with poet and activist Janine Pommy Vega. He is currently focused on writing poetry and personal narrative essays.
 

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April Freely

April Freely studied at Brown University where she earned a BA in English, and at the University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Forklift, OH, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.  She has received fellowships and awards from the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation

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Carolina Gómez Montoya

Carolina Gómez Montoya (M.A. and Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park) is an adjunct professor at Portland State University. Previously, she taught at Bard High School Early College in Queens & Newark and at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is interested in studying the practice of writing during times of violence and political repression, and the intersections between writing and displacement. She has published articles and fiction in Literal: Latin American Voices/Voces Latinoamericanas; ¡Basta! Mujeres colombianas contra la violencia de género (Bogotá: Debate escrito, 2015). Most recently, she received a scholarship from the NW Film Center that supported the making of her short film “The Mechanists” (2018). This upcoming year, she will be joining the Oregon Humanities’ Humanity in Perspective program. This partnership provides access to college-level education for adults living on low incomes through an 8-month course on philosophy, literature, history, art history and visual culture, and critical thinking and writing.

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Karen Gover

Karen Gover (B.A., University of Richmond; Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) teaches philosophy at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. She has published scholarly articles in International Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the Journal of Aesthetic Education. Her art criticism has appeared in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics: Art and Perception, and the online magazine Artcritical. Gover is the recipient of a grant from the German Academic Exchange service, she was a fellow at Williams College's Oakley Center for the Humanities, and she is the 2011 recipient of the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics. Gover's book, Art and Authority:  Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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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 (B.A., Reed College; M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.Div., Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University) is an award-winning poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, with a secondary field through Visual and Environmental Studies/Social Anthropology in Critical Media Practice. Her creative practice and research resonate with a matrix of philosophical, aesthetic, and theological sources, in which writing, spiritual training, performance, documentary film, and ethnography intersect and are shaped by the dynamic interface of subjectivity and language – the wound and the word --  and inquire into the incarnational and the transformational. In what ways can our writings become sites of evolution, sites of resistance, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language to radically change our way of being in the world? Her poetry and essays have been published widely, most recently in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tricycle, The American Poetry Review, and the Cambridge University Press volume White Light. She is author of the poetry collection Immolation and a recipient of grants and fellowships from Harvard University, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Laurels Foundation/PSU. Recent film and multimedia work has been presented at the Harvard Film Studies Center, SEEDS Festival/ Earthdance, Sonoma State University, WAXworks (NYC), BAX (NYC), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in various collaborations and street performances in NYC and elsewhere. She has taught contemporary poetics, religion, literature, arts and media courses at Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard Prison Initiative, and Hofstra University, as well as in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, where she has taught as a poet on the faculty since 2007. More information is available at kytheheller.com.

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Hilary Kaplan

Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, which won the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award in 2016. Her most recent translations are Marília Garcia'sThe Territory Is Not the Map, and 46750, a collaboration between photographer João Pina and poet Viviane Salles. Ms. Kaplan has contributed to Granta, The White Review, and BBC Radio 4. Her othertranslations of Brazilian prose and poetry include Paloma Vidal's short story collection, Ghosts, poems by Ricardo Domeneck and Claudia Roquette-Pinto, and forthcoming work by Ricardo Aleixo. She received a PEN Translation Fund award and a Rumos Literatura fellowship in literary criticism from Itaú Cultural. Her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry in English, Portuguese, and French; ecopoetics, ecocriticism, and environmental history; feminist and queer theory; and practices of freedom. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing: Poetry, and, frequently, a baby.
 

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Karen Lepri

Karen Lepri is the author of Incidents of Scattering (Noemi Press, 2013). Her poems, essays, reviews, and translations from Spanish have appeared in various national and international journals including Aufgabe, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner. Her collaborative writings on feminist and anti-racist pedagogy have appeared in Feminist Spaces and Albeit. Her research interests include the politics of misrecognition, poetry, modernism, magic, and queer/critical race/decolonial theory. Lepri holds her M.F.A in Literary Arts from Brown University and is nearly finished with her Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a member of the faculty of the Expository Writing Program at New York University. She has previously taught writing and literature at Cooper Union, Queens College, and Bard's Language & Thinking Program. 

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Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss

Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss (B.A., New School for Social Research; M.A., Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research; Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Training and Research Institute for Self-Psychology; Psy.D. (critical theory/psychology), Wright Institute/Professional School of Psychology, 2012) works on the role of high culture in Jewish assimilation and the pairing of high culture and barbarism in the Holocaust. She is founding director of the Terezin Publishing Project and editor of the forthcoming 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, 2014). The Terezin Publishing project has also brought out a reprint of "The Terezin Requiem," "Psychological Life in Terezin," "Composers in Theresienstadt" and other newly-translated works on Jewish life in Central Europe. Her 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 and The Prague Post. She is currently writing articles for TIKKUN and Jewish Currents. She has written extensively on the Jewish encounter with modernity and is author of the forthcoming "Songs in the Wilderness: Music in the Holocaust and the Betrayal of 'Bildung.'" She sits on the Board of Directors of Partners for Progressive Israel (MeretzUSA). Her many interdisciplinary affiliations include the International Society for Political Psychology and the International Psychohistorical Association, and she has given presentations on the Jewish encounter with modernity at conferences, schools, religious centers and JCCs in the United States and abroad (Poland, Austria, Holland, Czech Republic). She is the recipient of grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and Internaciones. This past spring, under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College (with a grant from the Bertha Effron Fund), she curated the inaugural concert/lecture series, "Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism."

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Andrew McCarron

Andrew McCarron (B.A., Bard; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.Phil, Ph.D, Graduate Center of The City University of New York) currently chairs the Religion, Philosophy, & Ethics Department at Trinity School in Manhattan, and also teaches in the English Department. He has published a collection of poetry called Mysterium (Edgewise Press, 2011), and two book-length psychological studies of artists’ lives: Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle, and Paul Violi (Station Hill Press, 2015), and Dylan on Dylan: the transfigurations of an American troubadour (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2015).  

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Jesse Miller

Jesse Miller (B.A., Oberlin College; Ph.D., University at Buffalo) is a writer, musician, and teacher whose interests include literary modernism, improvisation, cultural approaches to health, illness, and disability, and the role of writing and the arts in precipitating social change. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Writing in the University at Buffalo School of Management and is currently a faculty fellow with the University at Buffalo Experiential Learning Network. His academic book project "The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Modernism, Bibliotherapy, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1916-1944" excavates a link between the work of American modernist writers such as Kenneth Burke, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Toomer, and early twentieth-century efforts to promote the practice of therapeutic reading. He has studied the contemporary application of his research on the history of reading for mental health as a 2015-2016 Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellow. He makes music with the band Lalalangue and is also Managing Reviews Editor for Full Stop Magazine (www.full-stop.net), a web publication aimed at engaging with contemporary literature and publishing with a focus on debuts, small press publications, and works in translation. 

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Theresa Morris

Theresa Morris (M.A., Ph.D., New School for Social Research) Theresa Morris's work in philosophy explores responsibility as a mode of being for human beings, particularly as responsibility pertains to the ecological preservation of the planet and to care for future generations. Her manuscript, Hans Jonas's Ethic of Responsibility, was published by SUNY Press in 2013. Theresa's interests include the relation between practical action and human self-understanding, and the problem of motivation in ethics, particularly in relation to climate change. She is an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at Pace University. She is also a poet.

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Gillian Osborne

Gillian Osborne holds degrees in literature and creative writing from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research interests include American literature, poetry and poetics, the long history of “nature writing,” birds, neighbors, seasons, and flowers. From 2015-2017, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for the Environment, and her work has been supported by other fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Emily Dickinson International Society. She writes and publishes essays, reviews, and poems, and is the co-editor of Ecopoetics: Essays from the Field. In addition to teaching for the Bard Language & Thinking Program, she has taught high school students in Japan and Oregon, college students in California, adult learners incarcerated at San Quentin for the Prison University Program, and students and teachers from around the world at the Harvard Extension School.

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Christopher Rey Pérez

Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet working from within a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language in order to incorporate the liminality of a type of “border thinking” he has experienced and witnessed throughout his life. His published works of poetry and fiction in English and Spanish include On the heels of our enemies, 427-375, regeneración, an untitled collaboration with Barbara Ess, El Siete Machos, REYNOSA, andCompendio palestino-puertorriqueño en proceso. His book, gauguin's notebook, received the 2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from Lake Forest College. Other writings appear in magazines such as Shoppinghour, The Brooklyn Rail, diSONARE, Fanzine, and Makhzin. Since 2012, he has edited a nomadic publication in, of, and around Latin America, called Dolce Stil Criollo, which has exhibited at artbook venues, such as Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Mochi-LA in Los Angeles, Feira Plana in São Paulo, among other places. Christopher is a graduate of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a former Visiting Lecturer at al-Quds Bard College for Arts & Sciences in Palestine. Currently, he is a 2017-18 La Práctica fellow with Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is experimenting with novelistic processes that explore how translation reveals an encounter of colonial projections mapped onto personal and collective traumas. He is originally from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

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Kristin Prevallet

Kristin Prevallet (B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder; M.A., University of Buffalo) has published fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous anthologies, books, and journals including the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Chicago Review, and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. The author of five books of poetry and three books of creative healing, her essay "Blood on the Illusion: The Violent Side Effects of Capitalism" was chosen as a 2015 notable essay by the editors of the Best American Essays. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she has received grants, residencies and awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, Centre Internationale de Poesie, Spalding University, and Poet's House. She teaches for Bard's Prison Initiative and maintains a private mindbody coaching practice in Westchester, NY.

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Sahar Romani

Sahar Romani trained as a human geographer and ethnographer, receiving an MA from University of Washington and a PhD from Oxford. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her essays and reviews are published and forthcoming in Gender, Place and Culture, Contemporary South Asia, and Boston Review. Her poems appear in The Offing, Asian American Writers Workshop’s Margins, and 92Y’s Podium. She previously taught interdisciplinary research and writing at New York University, Yale University, and CUNY College of Staten Island.
 

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Andrea Quaid

Andrea Quaid’s (B.A., M.F.A., Antioch University, Ph.D. University of California Santa Cruz) work focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, pedagogy, and feminist studies. She is co-editor of Acts + Encounters, a collection of works about experimental writing and community. Recent publications include two collaboratively-written essays, “Variations on a Theme: Teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric" (albeit) and “Alarming Logic: Feminist Poetics as Discursive/Pedagogic Intervention” (Feminist Spaces Journal). Her essay “Place as Palimpsest: Literary Works and Cultural-Political Resistance” appears in Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (Routledge). Other work appears in American Book Review, BOMBlog, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is series co-editor of the new Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. She recently co-organized the Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogiessymposium.  She is Literature Faculty in Bard College’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program (Los Angeles) and a Faculty Associate in Bard College’s Language and Thinking Program (New York). She also teaches in the Critical Studies Department at California Institute of the Arts. 

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Brian Schwartz

Brian Schwartz (B.A., Brandeis University; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine; Ph.D., New York University) has published fiction and non-fiction in Harvard Review, Blackbird, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere, and his story "Invasion" was recently selected for the anthology Inheriting the War. At U.C. Irvine, he was awarded a Regents Fellowship and the Cheng Fellowship in Fiction, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Areas of interest include creative non-fiction, the short story and the culture of American sports. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and has taught in Bard's Language and Thinking Program since 2012. Additionally, he has taught at U.C. Irvine, San Francisco State, and at the Fir Acres Workshop at Lewis and Clark, an IWT Summer High School Writing Program. 

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Aya Tanaka

Aya Tanaka has been teaching first-year writing courses at NYU-Stern School of Business since 2011. Her current research focuses on the relationship between business and economics in Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours' writings. Prof. Tanaka earned her PhD at Rutgers University, where her dissertation focused on historicism and historiography in travel accounts and fiction in eighteenth-century French literature. She also holds Masters degrees in International Finance and Business from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and in International Political Economy from American University. She received her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College with a double major in International Relations and French.

She has also held fellow and teaching positions at Williams College and Mount Holyoke College.  Prior to her doctoral studies, Prof. Tanaka worked as assistant equity strategist for BBVA Securities, providing political and economic analysis of Latin American markets to US institutional investors.

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Hap Tivey

Before graduating from Pomona College in 1969, Hap Tivey (B.A., Pomona College; M.F.A., Claremont Graduate School) began creating light structures as sculpture. Often considered one of the original Los Angles light artists he created seminal light installations during the seventies and collaborated on projects with Doug Wheeler and James Turrell. Tivey received his MFA in Fine Art and MA in Photography from Claremont Graduate School, and opened his first studio in Pasadena where visitors could encounter empty fields of light as subjective experience rather than objective art. He then made an unusual journey to Japan. As a Zen monk in the first generation of American practitioners, he played a fundamental role in rehabilitating a major Zen monastery in Kyoto that had been closed since the end of World War II. The abbot of Tofuku-ji Monastery, Roshi Fukushima, recognized Tivey as his first disciple in his book “Living Here in the Present Moment with Clear Mind”. Tivey left monastic life and returned to the U.S. to continue pioneering the phenomena of light as concrete experience. He moved to New York, where he continued investigating the emotional and theoretical implications that light provides. His light sculptures and installations have mysterious qualities, some with intensely saturated colors, others with calm and apparently infinite depth. Memorable installations include columns of light over water in Christophe de Menil’s Frank Gehry house and Claude Picasso’s tearoom in Paris. His work has been collected by more than a dozen museums, including MOMA and the Guggenheim. In 1977, New York magazine featured twelve young cutting-edge visual artists. Among them were Judy Pfaff, recent chair of the Studio Arts Program at Bard College, and Hap Tivey, Bard’s artist in residence 2000 through 2015. Judy and Hap began their friendship in those exciting days of Soho’s art explosion and maintained it through careers that spanned five decades producing long lists of shows, reviews and teaching appointments. When Judy brought him to Bard, he began teaching what he called Cybergraphics, a term he invented in 1995 when he introduced Photoshop 3.0 computer based art to Bard’s Studio Arts Program. Through it all, Tivey maintained an authentic Zen practice, raised two children and pursued wilderness adventures, including summiting Mount Denali. He is currently married to playwright Chiori Miyagawa, lives in New York and maintains studios in Brooklyn and upstate New York. 

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Robin Tremblay-McGaw's (M.L.I.S., University of California Berkeley; Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz) interests include: Poetics and poetry, narrative and narrative theory; feminist and queer theory. Currently she is thinking about the intersections of ethics, privilege, race, gender, and sexuality in experimental writing and revising a manuscript entitled "This Side of a Human Future: Poetry Wars and Imagined Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1975-1995." Her book of poems, Dear Reader (Ithuriel's Spear), came out in August 2015. Recent talks and articles include a collaborative panel for the PhiloSOPHIA: Poetry, Politics & Feminist Theory Conference 2016with Andrea Quaid, Karen Lepri, Madhu Kaza, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Margaret Rhee. The text from this panel, entitled “Alarming Logics,” is forthcoming in Feminist Spaces 2.2. She was the co-organizer for the seminar "New Narrative/New Poetries" at the Poetics (the Next) 25 Years Conference at the University at Buffalo in April 2016; her seminar paper for this conference is entitled “Not Resembling the Face in the Mirror: New Narrative, Race & Ethics.” She has also published work on Harryette Mullen (MELUS Summer 2010 & Tripwire 2014),Joan Retallack (Aufgabe 2013), and others. Her writing has appeared in Little Red Leaves, On: Contemporary Practice, HOW2, Crayon, Mirage, Digital Artifact Magazine, POM2, Narrativity, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004). An ardent fan of Bikram yoga and strong coffee, Robin lives in San Francisco, teaches at Santa Clara University, and edits the blog www.xpoetics.blogspot.com. Robin is most recently the co-editor with Rob Halpern of From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (ON Contemporary Practice, 2017).

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Anna Vitale

Anna Vitale is a poet, scholar, and performer. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed a dissertation in contemporary American literature entitled, Suicidal Fantasy in Three American Authors. Vitale describes the emergence of suicidal fantasy in works by Amiri Baraka, Kathy Acker, and David Wojnarowicz and shows how psychoanalytic methods of interpretation can yield rich psychical and political meaning from unassailable murderous fantasies, in particular for those of us who suffer from the failures of American dreams of progress. Vitale also earned an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is the author of Detroit Detroit (Roof Books, 2017), Different Worlds (Troll Thread, 2017), Unknown Pleasures (Perfect Lovers, 2013), and Anna Vitale’s Pop Poems (OMG!, 2010). Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Harriet, Jacket2, Pedagogy, and P-Queue. Her video, “Street View Lyric,” was published by Gauss PDF. She grew up in the city of Detroit and lives in Brooklyn. In summer 2017, she was a fellow at the New School's Institute for Critical and Social Inquiry.

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Kirin Wachter-Grene

Kirin Wachter-Grene is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Liberal Arts and Coordinator of the First Year Seminar Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington (UW) with a focus on 19th-21st century African American literature and gender and sexuality studies, and an MA in Liberal Studies from The Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2015 she received a UW English Department Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. She is currently at work on her manuscript, titled Into the Scorpion Garden: Samuel R. Delany and Transgressive African American Literature, and is guest-editing a special issue of The Black Scholar to commemorate the journal’s 50th anniversary. She has articles and reviews published in African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, The International Journal of Diverse Identities, and InVisible Culture.

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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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Cecelia Watson

Cecelia Watson (B.A., St. John's College; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a writer based in London. Her academic specialty is the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. Prior to moving overseas two years ago, she followed a traditional academic path: most recently she was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Yale University, where she was jointly appointed in both Philosophy and Humanities. Prior to that she held positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the European College of Liberal Arts, and the University of Chicago, and she has also served as a consultant and curator to the Berlin museum Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Her book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark will be published in 2019 by HarperCollins.

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Annie Wyman

Annie Julia Wyman studies both the cultural and social practice of comedy and the poetic and philosophical structure of comic art. An award-winning teacher, she has spoken about and taught comedy and other topics at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and the Forum on Contemporary Theory in Dehradun, India. Her co-translation of Giorgio Agamben’s The Unspeakable Girl (Seagull Books) appeared in 2013. Annie is also a widely published nonfiction writer and critic. Her work has appeared in n+1, the New Republic, the Paris Review, VICE, the New Yorker, Cabinet, McSweeney’s, the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, politicsslashletters, the Organist, the Point, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere and has been collected in City by City (n+1 / FSG) and Read Harder: The Best of the Believer (Believer Books). A former fiction editor at McSweeney’s, Annie has seen her own fiction shortlisted for the 2017 White Review Prize. She sold her first television show in the spring of 2017. In September 2017, she will be a fellow of the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. Annie holds a BA in Creative Writing with a focus in poetry and an MA in English from Stanford (2008; 2009) and received an MA English and a PhD in English from Harvard (2013; 2017).