Faculty Associates

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Emily Abendroth

Emily Abendroth (B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., Temple University) is a teacher, writer, and human rights activist residing in Philadelphia. She regularly teaches literature, the contemporary essay, 20th-century poetics, and creative writing to undergraduates and students of all ages. Much of her creative work attempts to investigate state regimes of force and power, as well as individual and collective resistance strategies. Her poetry is often published in limited edition, handcrafted chapbooks by small and micropresses such as Albion Press, Belladonna, Horse Less Press, Little Red Leaves, and Zumbar. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2012, she was named a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and in 2013, a Pew Fellow in Poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ (Ahsahta Press, 2014) and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis (Carville Annex Press, 2016). She is the co-founder of Address This!, a grassroots educational project that offers social-justice focused correspondence courses to individuals incarcerated throughout the state of Pennsylvania. 

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Dorothy Albertini

Dorothy Albertini teaches for Bard’s Learning Commons and works as an assistant Dean of Studies in the Center for Student Life & Advising at Bard. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Arts Colony, Ucross Foundation, and the Blue Mountain Center. Her work appears in Fence, Aufgabe, Drunken Boat, The Brooklyn Rail, and NANO Fiction, where she was the winner of the first annual NANO fiction contest. For many years, she was the Associate for College Preparatory & Volunteer Programs and Green Haven Campus Coordinator at the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). During her time with BPI, Albertini developed and taught a college preparatory writing and reading course, utilizing Institute practices as the foundation for addressing students’ transitions from varied educational backgrounds. She received her B.A. from Bard College and MFA from Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

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Jaime Alves

Jaime Alves is Associate Professor of Literature in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. She also teaches a variety of courses in the undergraduate college, and develops programming to support new- and mentor teachers in secondary schools, through international partnerships with OSUN network faculty, and locally throughout the Hudson Valley. Areas of particular research interest include nineteenth-century literary representations of schoolgirls and female education; domesticity and gender studies; science, medicine and disability studies; newspapers/periodicals and archival research; museums as purveyors of knowledge and sites of informal learning. Among other publications, Jaime's scholarship has been featured in Legacy and American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard; she is the author of Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge 2009; paperback 2013).  

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Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Glynis Benbow-Niemier lives and writes in Illinois. She is a Lead Coach in Writing, Reading, Speech Assistance (WRSA) at College of DuPage where she coordinates WRSA’s in-class workshop program and the new asynchronous coaching service for students.  Before becoming a coach, she taught English Composition at College of DuPage for many years as an adjunct.  She is a long-time Associate of the Institute for Writing & Thinking (IWT), joining in 1988, and has lead Language & Thinking and IWT workshops at Bard; summer writing workshops for high school students at several locations through the IWT Network; and in-service & onsite consulting workshops for IWT in the Midwest.  (PhD, New York University; MA, University of Colorado; BA, Indiana University.)

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Jeff Berger-White

Jeff Berger-White teaches English at Deerfield High School, outside of Chicago. This is his 32nd year there. During that time, he has taught all grades and all levels; he currently teaches A.P. Literature and Composition and Sophomore English. In 2007, Jeff was selected as one of Golden Apple’s Teachers of Distinction, and in 2019, Jeff won the Distinguished Secondary Teaching Award (DSTA) from Northwestern University. Jeff has been involved with Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking since 1996, when he began working with Lake Forest College’s Writing and Thinking Workshop, one of the Institute’s summer programs for high school students. In addition to teaching for many summers at Lake Forest College, Jeff has taught in the Monte Sol Writing Workshop at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Bard’s Language & Thinking Workshop. (B.A. and M.A.T., Boston University)

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Eve Berinati

Eve Berinati has taught high school English at public and independent schools in the U.S. and internationally, and is currently co-teaching Global Studies at Harwood Union High School in Vermont. Before embarking on a career in education, Eve worked as an itinerant cook, gardener, and massage therapist, and she continues to be fascinated by the relationship between the body, the mind, memory, and relationship to place. She is especially interested in promoting healing from individual and collective trauma through writing, thinking, and dialogue. Eve holds an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and a BS in Education from the University of Vermont. 

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Ian Bickford

Ian Bickford is Provost and Vice President of Bard College at Simon’s Rock. In recent articles in Milton Studies (“A High Shelf: Milton and Seventh-day Adventism,” 2010, and “(Survival of the) Fit(test), Though Few: Darwin’s Miltonic America,” forthcoming 2017) and Modern Philology (“‘Dead Might Not Be Dead’: Milton in the Americas and Jamaica Kincaid’s Flat World,” 2014), Bickford charts the often subterranean channels of John Milton’s influence in the Americas. His areas of research and teaching also include Early Modern race and gender, 19th-century American literature and religion, and film. Bickford holds an AA from Bard College at Simon's Rock, BA from U.C. Berkeley, MA from Stanford University, and PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Celia Bland

Celia Bland, IWT Associate Director, leads IWT workshops nationally and internationally.  She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Cherokee Road Kill, illustrated by Kyoko Miyabe (2018).  She is co-editor of a collection of critical essays about the poetry of Jane Cooper, A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan 2019).  Her essay on teaching poetry, "Dialogic Poetry," appeared in Reflecting Pool: Poets on the Creative Process (SUNY 2018).

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Margaret Ranny Bledsoe

Margaret Ranny Bledsoe spent the first twenty years of her professional life working in academia, including formative years in the mathematics department of Bard College and at the University of the Oriente in Venezuela.  While at Bard, she began working with the Institute for Writing and Thinking and has continued this collaboration throughout her career.  Her work in public education includes teaching mathematics at the middle and high school level, working as a mathematics coach in the Boston Public Schools, serving as headmaster of Charlestown High School in Boston, Massachusetts and serving as Superintendent of Schools in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.  She has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from New York University and a C.A.G.S. in Educational Leadership from the University of Massachusetts.

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Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch holds a BA in political philosophy from Carleton College, an MFA in poetry from Mills College, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. For two years, she taught literature and teaching methods at the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching program in Delano, California. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A Pew Fellow in the Arts, she is the author of three books of poetry, Letters to Kelly Clarkson (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), Valley Fever, and The Sacramento of Desire, and has published essays and book reviews in Journal of Modern Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Tripwire, and elsewhere. She is writing a critical book about lyric and the 20th-century long poem and is an editor at Jacket2.

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Maureen Burgess Chalfen

Maureen Burgess Chalfen is a writer and educator whose work reflects a thirty-plus year career in K-16 education. She received her Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University in 2000 where she taught for eight years before beginning a career in independent school education. Maureen's current areas of focus are writing as thinking as a mode of mindfulness practice in the classroom, adolescent girls as writers and storytellers in the digital age, educational innovation and strategic planning, and coaching/self-renewal practices for faculty in K-16 schools. Maureen studies with the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, where she has completed both a Certificate Program in Contemplative Psychotherapy and a Boundless Leadership program. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation.  

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Jeanne Cameron

Jeanne Cameron is a Professor of Sociology at Tompkins Cortland Community College, and a recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching and in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Collaborating with colleagues across disciplines, Jeanne regularly team-teaches courses that link sociological research with academic and creative writing. Her book, Canaries Reflect on the Mine: Dropouts’ Stories of Schooling, earned the American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Binghamton University.

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Rachel Cavell

Rachel Cavell teaches in Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, and is a Faculty Associate with Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, regularly leading professional development workshops, both at Bard College and elsewhere. She also teaches a course in Essay and Revision at Bard College; and has worked with faculty development at Bard-Smolny College (St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg, Russia), on teaching English for academic purposes. Rachel also teaches Civics and Writing at the Bard Prison Initiative Program, and has taught in the Bard Masters in Teaching Program. Rachel is also a writer (with recent publications in the Adelaide Literary Journal) and an attorney, representing children in disputes before the family court, among other things. She has a certificate in Restorative Justice with Planning Change, in NYC.

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Rebecca Chace

Rebecca Chace, IWT Program Manager, leads IWT workshops nationally and internationally.  She is the award-winning author of four books: Leaving Rock Harbor, Capture the Flag, Chautauqua Summer, and June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny. She has written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Yale Review, The LA Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, and many other publications. The author of two produced plays: Colette and The Awakening (adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin). She adapted her novel, Capture the Flag, for the screen and television with director Lisanne Skyler (Best Screenplay Short Film, 2010 Nantucket Film Festival). Rebecca has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies including American Academy Rome (visiting artist), Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dora Maar House, and others. Rebecca has also been an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She has been a faculty associate with the Institute for Writing & Thinking since 2006, and taught in the Language & Thinking Program as well as First-Year Seminar at Bard College. 

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Rajnesh Chakrapani

Rajnesh Chakrapani teaches for the Bard Language and Thinking Program and for the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a Fulbright Fellowship to translate an Anthology of Contemporary Roma poetry in Romania. He is a poet, translator and filmmaker and his chapbook of poems Brown People who Speak English is published by Guesthouse Press. He has work placed in Asymptote, Lana Turner, Speculative City, Triquarterly, Literary North, Sequestrum, and http://Crevice.ro.

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Jennifer Collins

Jennifer Collins has been teaching mathematics to middle and upper school students for over 25 years at independent schools in New York City.  A lover of literature and poetry, she looks for opportunities in her courses to introduce texts that expose students to different ways of thinking about mathematical concepts.  She has also taught afterschool programs and optional classes that focus on problem solving and topics that fall outside the standard curriculum.  A former adjunct professor in the School of Education at City College, she holds a BA in Music from Columbia University and an MA in Mathematics Education from Teachers College.  

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Deirdre d'Albertis

Deirdre d'Albertis 
B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University. Author, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text and volume editor, Elizabeth Gaskelli's Ruth.  Current projects include Femina Faber: Victorian Women, Writing Work and the Work of Writing along with a study of transnational feminist networks in England, Europe, and the United States focused through the relationship of Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer and her English translator Mary Howitt.  Essays on George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Howitt as well as reviews have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts;  Victorian Studies; Studies in English Literature; Victorians Institute Journal; Journal of the History of Sexuality; and Review. Grants and awards: National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend and American Association of University Women American Fellowship. Areas of interest: Victorian literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, history of the novel, environmental approaches to literature and post-apocalyptic narrative; women and leadership, public education and the study of literature.

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Alan Devenish

Alan Devenish joined the Bard Prison Initiative college program in 2017. A founding faculty member of the Language & Thinking Program and the Institute for Writing and Thinking, he has led numerous workshops for students and teachers at Bard and at sites nationwide. He also directed the Bard Writing and Thinking Workshop for high school students at Lake Forest College in its inaugural years. Formerly Professor of English at Westchester Community College, where he co-directed the Poets & Writers Series and Human Rights Union, he received SUNY Chancellor’s Awards in Teaching, Scholarship and Creative Activity. His poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He was awarded ongoing fellowships in classical studies and human rights from the Faculty Resource Network at New York University where he earned an M.A. in French Literature and Ph.D. in English Education.

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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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Stephanie Dunson

Stephanie Dunson, PhD, is former Director of Writing Programs at Williams College (2010-2019). In addition to serving the traditional role, she initiated programs committed to the support of faculty not only as teachers but also as writers, working with professors of every rank to help them adopt sustainable writing practices that could be meaningfully integrated into their academic lives. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts and was formerly professor of American Culture and African American Literature at the University of Rhode Island. In her decades-long career as a writing specialist, she has held positions as Director of the Writing Center at Mount Holyoke College, Coordinator of Tutorial Services at Smith College, and Lecturer for the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University. Her scholarly work in race representation in 19th-Century America has garnered awards from the Mellon and Ford foundations. As a long-standing faculty consultant for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, she has led workshops at schools and universities across the country.  She currently serves as a private writing consultant, working primarily with faculty and scholars at Yale University and is also host of the podcast “100 Mistakes Academic Writers Make…and How to Fix Them.”

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Tonya Foster

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist and Black feminist scholar based in the Bay Area, CA. Her full-length poetry collection, A Swarm of Bees in High Court was published by Belladonna* in 2015. In 2016, Foster’s bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os was published by joca seria on the occasion of a three-city tour in France. Forthcoming are her poetry collection—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse) and a chapbook—AHotB (Sputnik and Fizzle). She is coeditor of the essay collection Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). A poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, Foster’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day online journal, Entropy Magazine, the A-Line Journal, Callaloo, boundary2, TripWire, Poetry Project Newsletter, The Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. She was a member of the advisory committee for the ground-breaking exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Her essay for the exhibition’s field guide, “Time, Memory, and Living in Shotgun Houses in the South of the South City of New Orleans,” expands her meditations on place and emplacement. She is the 2020-2021 Lisa Goldberg fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. A recipient of awards from Macdowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others, Dr. Foster, beginning in Fall 2021, will serve as the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. She has over twenty-years of experience teaching literature, writing, and creative writing to students of various ages.

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Derek Furr

Derek Furr is Dean of Teacher Education and a literature professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. He also teaches for the Bard Prison Initiative. He is the author of three books—Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave 2010), Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and Semitones (2015)—and has recent work in Jacket2, Twentieth Century Literature, and Raritan. He was formerly a middle school English Language Arts teacher and reading specialist and a research assistant for the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement. 

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Darlene Gold

Darlene Gold is a photographer and Professor of English & Creative Writing at Tompkins Cortland Community College. In June 2021, her photograph, Magnified Gaze won a Judge’s Award at the State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, NY. In February 2021 she was awarded the Top Honor Prize in the Community category of WSKG’s Portraits and Dreams Photography Challenge. Gold performed her word & image project Never Before Has a Window Seemed So Much Like an Ear (in response to Gary Sczerbaniewicz’s The Tower and the Shard) at the SUNY Dowd Gallery, Cortland NY in Dec 2020. Her photographs have been selected for the juried exhibitions: State of the Art Gallery’s 32nd Photography Exhibition & Awarded “Judge’s Pick”: Ithaca, NY, 2021. Made In New York (MINY) the Schweinfurth Art Center: Auburn NY, 2020 and the State of the Art Gallery’s 31st Photography Exhibition: Ithaca, NY, 2020. Gold co-created and co-teaches the courses: Word & Photographic Image, Digital Memoir and Kelab: Literary & Visual Arts Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Mudfish, Pressed Wafer, The Hat and The Minnesota Review.  Her chapbook, Midnight Antelopes, was published by Pressed Wafer Press.  Her essay, “Pianoforte a Quatre Mains,” made the Prism International’s Creative Nonfiction Contest longlist. Her essay, “Wedding” appears in the International Anthology:  Under the Volcano: The Best Writing of Our First 15 Years, Morelos Mexico, 2018. In May 2017, she received the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

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Rebecca Granato

Rebecca Granato is the assistant dean and visiting assistant professor of history at al Quds Bard College in Abu Dis, where she has been since the program’s inception in 2009. She has been teaching in the Language & Thinking Program, the Institute’s program for incoming Bard first-years, since 2004 and she currently oversees the L&T program at al Quds Bard. As an institute associate, Rebecca has given workshops at several of Bard’s international partnership programs, including her home institution, al Quds Bard, Bard in Annandale, European Humanities University in Lithuania, and at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. Her own research focuses on the evolution of Palestinian nationalism inside Israeli prisons between 1967 and 1985. Rebecca is currently a Palestinian American Research Council fellow, and more recently the recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for dissertation completion.

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Alfred E. Guy Jr.

Alfred E. Guy Jr. is R.W.B. Lewis Director of Writing at Yale, where he also oversees STEM tutoring. He has previously worked as a writing program director at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and New York University. Lately, he’s been spending a lot of time talking about ChatGPT and other AI writers. His scholarship includes studies in composition and rhetoric, medieval English literature, and American science fiction. Awards include the Richard Brodhead Award for Teaching Excellence (Yale), and the Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence (NYU). (B.A., Harvard; M.A., New York University; Ph.D., New York University.)

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James Harker

James Harker is Director of Academic Services and the Learning Commons at Bard College Berlin, where he has also directed the Language and Thinking Program since 2013. His research interests include modernist and contemporary fiction, narratology, and cognition. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. 

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Daniel Herman

Daniel Herman received his doctorate in Literature in 2011, from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, under the supervision of Vincent O’Sullivan, former Poet Laureate of New Zealand. He is the author of Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick, which arose from his years of residential Buddhist practice at the San Francisco Zen Center (Tassajara and Green Gulch) and overseas. He also organized the first San Francisco Moby-Dick Marathon in October 2015, which has since become an annual event. He teaches various Humanities classes at Maybeck High School in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, two young daughters, and medium-sized dog.

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Nick Hiebert

Nick Hiebert teaches high school English at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. His areas of interest include the literature of social justice, contemporary fiction and memoir, environmental/food writing, and literature about technology and community.

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Michelle Hoffman

Michelle Hoffman (B.Sc., Concordia University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Toronto) is the Assistant Director of IWT and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, where she teaches courses in history and philosophy of science and in the First-Year Seminar program. Michelle's area of focus at IWT is writing to learn in STEM disciplines. Previously, she has taught at the American University of Central Asia, Bard's partner in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, as well as in Bard's Language and Thinking Program and the Bard Prison Initiative. Her research focuses on the history of psychology and education. She has a particular interest in transfer of training, a body of experimental research that examines whether learning skills acquired in one area readily transfer to other domains—a question that strikes at the core of teachers’ work.

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Jamie Hutchinson

Jamie Hutchinson (AB, English, Stanford University; MA, English, University of Virginia; PhD, American Studies, University of New Mexico) is Professor Emeritus of English at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he continues to teach on an adjunct basis. He also directs the Bard College at Simon's Rock Summer Young Writers Workshop, in which he taught from 1983 to 2013. Previous teaching positions include Colorado State University, the University of New Mexico, Berkshire Community College, and SUNY Albany. He taught in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College (1984-1990) and led teacher workshops for the Institute for Writing & Thinking from 1984 until the early 2000s. His articles, personal essays, and reviews have appeared in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, The American Nature Writing Newsletter, The Berkshire Review, Under the Sun, Writing From the Inside Out, Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature and The Journal of Inklings Studies. He has also presented papers at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association, the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, the New England Modern Language Association, and the American Literature Association. 
 

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Ileana Jiménez

Ileana Jiménez is the founder of feministteacher.com, @feministteacher, and the #HSfeminism and #K12feminism hashtags. An educator-activist for nearly 25 years, she teaches high school students, graduate students, as well as pre- and in-service teachers critical feminist pedagogies, curricula, and activism. Her doctoral research in the English Education program at at Teachers College, Columbia University, includes Black and Latina women of color feminisms; feminist digital and school-based activisms; and feminist research methodologies. In 2011, she received a Distinguished Fulbright to interview queer youth in Mexico City. Globally, she presents workshops for teachers and scholars on critical feminist and queer pedagogies in schools. She has published in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (volume 1, 2016); Radical Teacher (vol. 106, 2016); One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better... and What Hasn't (Beacon, 2015); SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence (Feminist Press, 2015); The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (Feminist Press, 2015); and Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (Praeger, 2018). She received her B.A. in English Literature at Smith College, and an M.A. in English Literature at Middlebury College.

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Madhu Kaza

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connections between migration and translation and which features immigrant, diasporic and poc translators. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, EcoTheo Review, Two Lines, Chimurenga, and more. She earned a BA with honors in English from the University of Michigan and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from New York University. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, where she served most recently as Assistant Dean of the Bard Microcolleges, and currently teaches in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University. She has been a Faculty Associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College since 2006.

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James Keller

Jim Keller (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, which houses Bard’s tutor support and writing center, college writing courses, and the learning strategies program. 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 composition theory and pedagogy. He has taught literature and writing courses at 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 has led 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.

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Mary Krembs

Mary C. Krembs (B.A. Mathematics with Music minor, Marist College; M.S. and Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is the Director of the Bard College Citizen Science program, the college’s mandatory January intensive for all first-year students, designed to deepen science literacy.  Mary’s research interests include computational geometry (Voronoi Nets), computer graphics, software development methodology, human-computer interaction, mathematical methods to compose and represent music, and integration of writing to learn in STEM. She taught as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics for four years at Marist College, and has been teaching at Bard College since January 2007 initially in the undergraduate mathematics department, now in the Master of Arts in Teaching program.  Mary teaches the full range of undergraduate and graduate mathematics courses, in addition to computer graphics, computational geometry and STEM Teaching Methods. She spent the earlier part of her career working in the technology industry as a mathematician and developer for IBM, focused on Spline (NURBS and Bezier) applications within Geographic Information Systems, Human Computer Interfaces for load balancing applications within Parallel Computing and as a researcher in the Data Visualization lab at the TJ Watson Research Center. Mary moved on to become Senior Vice-President of Technology for Harte-Hanks Interactive with a focus on new media primarily for large pharmaceutical clients as well as e-commerce sites. Mary holds the patent on “A Method to Detect the Closest Existing Point on a Spline or Polyline.”

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Abby Laber

Abby Laber taught high school and college English for over 40 years. Most recently, she worked at Concord Academy in Massachusetts where she developed courses on Shakespeare, memoir, close reading, creative nonfiction and the academic essay. She also ran seminars for new teachers. Abby received her A.B. from Harvard University. Through NEH and with the Calderwood Writer’s Initiative, Abby studied composition theory and memoir; she studied teaching through performance at Shakespeare's Globe and has been taking part in IWT workshops since the Institute began. Abby has presented her approach to close reading—the "Overview and Inventory"—at NEATE and NYSEC.  She is currently working on a book about Jane Austen and Shakespeare.

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Mariia Laktionkina

Mariia Laktionkina currently serves on the faculty of the European Humanities University. She teaches Language & Thinking; First-Year Seminar “Introduction to Humanities”; Second-Year Seminar “Introduction to Social Sciences”; Hermeneutic Seminar; and “Global Citizenship.” She has also coordinated the EHU Debate Union since 2018. In her career, she is interested in the role that the humanities play in helping to form individuals who understand how to think across disciplines, how to apply critical judgment, how to navigate complex and conflicting worlds, and how to adapt to new and unpredictable environments in the future. In addition to teaching, she has been designing new programs and implementing new strategies into the curriculum at EHU. Her current research and practical interests include: public policy, philosophy of literature, pedagogical practices in liberal arts education, and higher education management.

Education
2007-2011 - B.A., Political Science, National Pedagogical Dragomanov University, Kyiv, Ukraine
2009 – 2013 B.A., Law, National University of State Tax Service of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
2011-2013 - M.A., Political and Social Critique, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Full-time Master degree study scholarship granted by the Ministry of Education, Sciences and Sport of Lithuania
2013-2015 LL.M., Master of International and European Law, Vilnius University, Lithuania. Under the supervision of Dainius Zalimas, former President Justice of Constitutional Court of Lithuania. Dean Fellowship at Law Department, Vilnius University.

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Nelly Lambert

Nelly Lambert taught literature and philosophy for many years at the Bard Early College campuses in Baltimore and DC, later serving as dean of studies at BEC in DC. In 2023 she moved to California, where she edits poetry and philosophical texts and is assembling a collection of her own city poems. Nelly did her undergraduate work in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, completing a graduate degree in film and Renaissance studies at Georgetown University, and a second MA in philosophy at Saint John’s College, Annapolis. She holds a doctorate in American poetry from Catholic University. A scholar of new forms in modernist literature, Nelly enjoys philosophies of humor and every possible intersection of poetry and visual art. Her work has received fellowship support from the Lannan Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the American Association of University Women, and the Library of Congress. She grew up in Haiti, France, and Washington, DC.
 

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Amanda Landi

Amanda Landi (Applied Mathematics, PhD; North Carolina State University, 2015) is a faculty of Mathematics for Bard College and Bard Academy at Simon’s Rock, 2015-Present.  She has three main areas of research: mathematical data science, data for good, and mathematics education and pedagogy.  For several years, Amanda has been developing and implementing a curriculum for writing as active learning in gateway undergraduate mathematics courses with the goal of helping students improve their critical and creative thinking skills in mathematics.  Amanda has co-authored works on metacognition in mathematics, and she is part of the inaugural class of IWT’s CLASP Fellows.  Her interests include getting better at bouldering, how to drink less coffee and more water, and strolling at sunset.

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Mare Leonard

Mary Leonard taught at Kingston High School for thirty years where she co-wrote a senior elective, In A Different Voice, which concentrated on American history, politics and literature and was the final course in the Law Program. While at Kingston she was a recipient of three NEH awards to study poetry and a Fulbright to study education in Brazil. After her retirement she taught at UCCC and Trinity College and wrote on assignment for a local newspaper. 

Her first love has always been poetry and fiction and she has published in numerous print and on line journals. Two most recent poems can be read in The Blue Collar Journal and in the collection of poems re Vietnam from Perfume River. She has been an associate of the Language and Thinking program since 1990, teaching workshops on campus and providing professional development for schools in the Hudson Valley. She presently works for Bard's MAT program. 

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Karen Lepri

Karen Lepri is Associate Clinical Professor of Expository Writing at NYU. She 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 writings on feminist and anti-racist pedagogy have appeared in Feminist Spaces and Albeit. Her current research interests include non-normative reproduction, family history, domestic labor, and sex work. Lepri has previously taught writing and literature at Cooper Union and Queens College CUNY, and continues to support other educators through Bard College's Institute for Writing & Thinking. (B.A., Harvard University; M.Ed., University of Massachusetts; M.F.A. in Literary Arts/Poetry, Brown University, Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.)

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Alice Lesnick

Alice Lesnick (B.A. Yale College; M.A., St. John's College, Sante Fe; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Term Professor of Education and Director, Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program; Associate Dean for Global Engagement; and Co-Director of Lagim Tehi Tuma, an organization based in Dalun, Ghana, and dedicated to centering education by Black liberation and study. Alice is currently co-writing a mentoring guide and beginning a study of the “action artistry” of people doing restorative practice across fields.  She also co-convenes the Workplace Advisors Program for conflict resolution at Bryn Mawr.  Working with the IWT since 1993, Alice brings informal writing as a means of community building to all of the work she does, and relishes ongoing opportunities to work with teachers and learners to realize the ready power of cultivating, sharing, and revisiting emergent language and thinking.

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Matt Longabucco

Matt Longabucco (B.A., Binghamton University; Ph.D., New York University) is a Clinical Professor in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, where he teaches first-year writing, aesthetic and political theory, and a thesis seminar for seniors concentrating in Creative Critical Production. His interests include modern and contemporary literature with an emphasis on poetry and poetics, theory, film, and composition. He is the author of the poetry collection Heroic Dose and M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain, a book-length study of a landmark of French cinema and its creator. He has been an associate of the Institute for Writing & Thinking since 2001, and taught for many years in the Language & Thinking Program. He lives in New York City.

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Sharon Marshall

An IWT Associate since 1996, Sharon Marshall has taught Language and Thinking and has led many faculty and Young Writers Workshops. She holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Vassar College and the City University of New York. She recently retired from St. John’s University in Queens, New York where she was an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the First Year Writing Program. A recipient of St. John’s University Faculty Outstanding Achievement Medal, she is a founding member of the Academic Center for Equity and Inclusion (ACEI) at St. John’s and served as Director of the Inclusive Campus Climate and Communication workgroup. Her essay “Thoughts on Teaching as a Practice of Love” was an inspirational text in the founding of the ACEI and has been frequently downloaded and read in graduate seminars around the country. She is a contributor to the IWT publication Writing-Based Teaching, and author of two novels, Water Child, and Deep Rivers. She is an avid photographer and urban gardener, and she also writes the occasional poem.

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Bill Martin

Bill Martin is a teacher, translator, editor, and cultural organizer and has been a Faculty Associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking since 2007. He was Head of the Literature and Society Program at Al-Quds Bard College for Arts & Science in Palestine for several years. Currently he teaches for the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin, Germany, where he lives, in addition to working as an academic editor for the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main. He has published a number of translations from Polish and German, including Michał Witkowski’s novels Lovetown (2012) and Eleven-Inch (forthcoming, Seagull Books). B.A. University of Iowa, M.A. University of Texas at Austin, ABD University of Chicago (all Comparative Literature).

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Tracy McCabe

Tracy McCabe is the Director of Writing Programs at Lake Forest College, where she also teaches English and Women’s Studies. Since 2000, she has directed the two-week summer Writing and Thinking Workshop for high school students, with Institute associates serving as the workshop leaders.

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Andrew McCarron

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 also serves on the ethics committee at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

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Kristy McMorris

Dr. McMorris has been an early college educator for over a decade. She began her work as a member of the Faculty in Literature at Bard High School Early College in Queens, New York, in 2009. She was the founding director of the Bard Early College at Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy. Dr. McMorris is an associate for the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking and has held multiple administrative roles at Bard Academy and Bard College at Simon’s Rock including Dean of Bard Academy. The scope of her work recently expanded to Dean of Studies for the 6-year academic program at Simon’s Rock, guiding students’ progress in the Academy and the College. Her areas of research include African American and Caribbean Literature and postcolonial and feminist approaches to texts. (B.A. in English Howard University, M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature New York University)

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Delia Mellis

Delia Mellis is Director of College Writing and Academic Resources for the Bard Prison Initiative and the Site Director at Woodbourne Correctional Facility. She has been a member of the BPI faculty since 2008 and taught for four years in the Department of Urban Studies at Barnard College. Mellis has written and lectured on race and gender in U.S. history throughout her career. She holds a Ph.D. in United States History from the Graduate Center of City University of New York and a B.A. from Bard College.

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Carley Moore

Carley Moore holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University, a M.A. in English Literature and Poetry from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English Education from New York University. She is the author of Panpocalypse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills, and The Stalker Chronicles.  She’s a Clinical Professor of Writing and Creative Production at New York University and she lives in Brooklyn.  Follow her on Instagram @fragmentedsky or find her blogging on Substack.

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Michael Murray

Michael Murray is faculty at Bard High School Early College in Newark, NJ, where he teaches literature, as well as academic and creative writing. He has taught at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and in Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching program. He is a certificated language arts teacher, as well as a folklorist who has studied traditional culture in the American suburb, vernacular art and artists, and public history. His curatorial work in cultural studies and oral history have been presented at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, New York) and the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife. MIchael holds a B.A. from George Mason University, an M.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Curt Nehring Bliss

Curt Nehring Bliss is a Professor of English at Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua, New York. After serving many years as the College's Honors Program Director and Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Coordinator, Curt has shifted his focus to supporting students' transition from high school to college. In this capacity, he currently oversees the College's AA Liberal Arts & Sciences degree and provides leadership on various First Year Experience initiatives. An educator for 26 years committed to the mission of open-admissions 2-year colleges, he has received recognition at the state level with a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Faculty Service and an Illinois Community College Trustees Association's Award for Outstanding Teaching. A longtime participant and Faculty Associate for the past 6 years, Curt has regularly facilitated IWT's week-long "Teaching the Academic Paper" workshop. Inspired by his work with IWT, he created the FLCC Honors House—a "laboratory for the teaching and learning arts," which features seminar-based classrooms in a home-like setting designed to promote active and reflective learning. Curt also writes and performs with Dead Metaphor Cabaret—an artist ensemble interested in exploring the fertile edges along which poetry and music graze.

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Gillian Osborne

Gillian Osborne holds a Ph.D. (2014) in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. (2006) in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. From 2015-2017, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She is the author of Green Green Green (Nightboat Books 2020) and the co-editor of Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (2018). Other publications include poetry and reviews; scholarship on Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville; and essays on the imagination of motherhood and the politics of foraged foods at fancy restaurants. In addition to teaching for the Bard College Language & Thinking Program and the Institute for Writing and Thinking, she is an Instructor & Senior Curriculum Specialist for Poetry in America, and has worked with students in writing and literature at UC-Berkeley, the Prison University Program at San Quentin, the Harvard Extension School, Arizona State University, and elsewhere.

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Irene Papoulis

Irene Papoulis is a Principal Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric at Trinity College, Hartford, where she teaches various essay writing courses. She currently serves as Director of Academic Advising and also as a DEI Faculty Fellow. She has published articles on the teaching of writing in various journals and book collections, and her textbook, The Essays Only You Can Write, is forthcoming in December from Broadview press. She is a longtime associate of IWT, and teaches in the summer Young Writers Workshop for high school students at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

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Phil Pardi

Philip Pardi is a poet and translator. His first book, Meditations on Rising and Falling, won the Brittingham Poetry Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Award for Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, Translation Review, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, and elsewhere. His most recent project, completed with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, is a volume of translations of selected work by the Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars. A former human rights activist and labor organizer, he has been at Bard since 2005, where he teaches poetry and serves as Director of College Writing and Co-Director of the Center for Faculty and Curricular Development. (B.A., Tufts University; M.F.A., Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas at Austin; Ph.D., SUNY Albany).

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Cindy Parrish

Cindy Parrish is an educator, film maker, graphic novelist, playwright, and professional storyteller. Co-founder of Heroic Productionz, an educational media production and consulting company, Dr. Parrish, until recently, taught humanities at the University at Albany's first year program, Project Renaissance. In 2012 she began teaching at Buxton School, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She has been an IWT associate since 1995. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts from Cornell University and a Doctor of Arts in English from the University at Albany.

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Christopher Rey Pérez

is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. His first book, gauguin's notebook, received the 2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from Lake Forest College. Recently, he has published Fayuca (diSONARE, ‘23) and the chapbook Future Tourism (Sputnik & Fizzle, ‘23). Other writings have appeared in Mexico, Brazil, Cyprus, Lebanon, Canada, the U.S., and China. Christopher has led poetry workshops with Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, The Garden Library for Refugees & Migrant Workers in South Tel Aviv, Beta-Local’s La Iván Illich, Queens Museum, Wendy’s Subway, Loudreaders Trade School, and the Schools of Architecture at Iowa State, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Virginia Tech. Currently, Christopher is the Assistant Dean of the Bard Microcolleges and part of the writing faculty at Bard M.F.A. (B.A. University of Texas at Austin, M.F.A. Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.)

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Nancy Kline Piore

Nancy Kline Piore publishes as Nancy Kline. Her short stories, essays, memoirs, flash nonfictions and translations have appeared widely, most recently in *Hawaii Pacific Review* and *The Prose Poem Project*. She contributes regularly to the *New York Times Sunday Book Review* and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. Her essay “Missing Paris” appears in *Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011*. She is about to publish her ninth book, a translation (with Mary Ann Caws) of Lorand Gaspar’s *Earth Absolute and Other Texts*. Earlier books include a novel (*The Faithful*), a critical study of René Char’s poetry (*Lightning*), and a biography of Elizabeth Blackwell (*A Doctor’s Triumph*). She has taught writing at UCLA, Harvard, and Barnard (where she was Founding Director of the Writing Program) and French language and literature at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Wellesley. She is currently teaching 20th Century French Literature in Translation, under the aegis of the Bard Prison Initiative, at Taconic Correctional Facility, and is at work on a book of creative nonfiction entitled *Other Geographies*.

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Kristin Prevallet

B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder; M.A., University of Buffalo. Poet, performer, and author of literary essays and cultural criticism. *Author, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time* (Essay Press, 2007) and *Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn* (Belladonna Collaborative, 2012). Co-editor, with Tonya Foster, of *Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art* and *A Helen Adam Reader* (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). Lives in Westchester and directs the Center for Mindbody Studies, with a private hypnotherapy practice in Manhattan. Faculty, Language and Thinking Program.

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Gadi Prudovsky

Gadi Prudovsky (B.A. and M.A., The Hebrew University; D.Phil., Oxford) teaches philosophy at Israel Arts and Science Academy (IASA), a high school for gifted students in Israel, and at the Hebrew University. His areas of research and teaching include philosophy of science (especially social science), of history, and of education. He is a cofounder of the IASA Institute for the Teaching of Humanities, through which he and his colleagues offer writing-and-thinking workshops to teachers in the Israeli educational system.

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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. 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, BOMBlog, Entropy, Feminist Spaces Journal, Full Stop, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT, Los Angeles Review of Books, Manifold, and Syllabus. She curates RAD! Residencies at the Poetic Research Bureau and is co-founding editor at the micro-publishing project, Rad-books! 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. She co-founded and directs Humanities in the City, which hosts public programs committed to education equity and the transformational power of interdisciplinary humanities study in classrooms and communities.(B.A., M.F.A., Antioch University, Ph.D.University of California Santa Cruz.)

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Joan Retallack

Joan Retallack is a poet and essayist: author of The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: UC Press, 2004); coeditor, with Juliana Spahr, Poetry and Pedagogy (Palgrave, 2006). She has published numerous other volumes—poetry, and essays on modernist and contemporary poetics. Retallack is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of Humanities at Bard where she taught in Languages and Literature and was core faculty in Written Arts. An IWT Faculty Associate since 1984, she directed the Bard Language & Thinking Program for ten years, 2000–2009. Retallack's The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times came out in 2018 from Litmus Press, from which BOSCH'D—her new poetry volume—is forthcoming.

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David Richardson

David Richardson is a writer, editor, and teacher. He holds a BA from Haverford College and an MFA from UMass Poets & Writers, where he won the 2020 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Fiction and served as an assistant editor for jubilat. Since 2015, he has co-directed the publishing project dispersed holdings, through which he edited the art and essay collections Speed of Resin (2019), Reading Room (2020), and Reading Now (2021). dispersed holdings' titles have been collected by the libraries of MoMA, SFMoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others, and dispersed has exhibited at book fairs across the US and abroad. David taught in the UMass Writing Program for five years, and has led workshops as part of Bard’s Language & Thinking Program. He currently works and teaches for the Bard Prison Initiative, where he is the site director of the Taconic campus and a member of the writing faculty. For select essays, reviews, and interviews, visit davidrichardson.page.

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Neil Rigler

Neil Rigler taught at the Lake Forest College Writing and Thinking Workshop, one of the Institute’s summer programs for high school students, for 20 years. He is currently in his 28th year at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, IL, where he teaches American Studies, Media Studies, and Creative Writing. He is a regular presenter at the NCTE and CASE (Council for American Studies Educators) conferences, with topics ranging from IWT techniques to AI applications. He has been a faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking for over twenty years and has taught several weekend workshops both regionally and at Bard. (B.S. Psychology, Duke University; M.A. English and M.S. Education, Northwestern University)

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Eléna Rivera

Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Arrangements (a collaboration with Peter Hughes, Aquifer Press, 2022), Epic Series (Shearsman Books, 2020), and Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017). She has published numerous other volumes of poetry and translation, including The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2011 and won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation and was a recent recipient of fellowships from MacDowell (2020), Trelex Paris Poetry Residency (2019), and the SHOEN Foundation (2016). She has been a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Writing & Thinking since 2001, and taught for sixteen years in the McGhee Division at New York University. She has also taught at the New School, the Stonecoast MFA program, Poets House, Poets & Writers, and will soon return to teach at the 92Y in New York City.

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Guy Risko

Guy Risko has served as the dean of studies at Bard High School Early College since 2018, where he oversees academic affairs, faculty development, and curriculum management. Guy has a diverse teaching and curriculum development portfolio covering areas across the liberal arts, including the humanities, fine arts, and STEM fields. He is an active workshop leader, focusing on writing-rich pedagogy and debate in the classroom, and has presented at conferences addressing topics such as early college pedagogy, literature, and critical theory.

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Alexios Rosario-Moore

Alexios Rosario-Moore is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Leadership, Educational Psychology, and Foundations Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he teaches courses on leadership ethics and research theory. He is a multi-disciplinary scholar focused on the educational, legal, and epistemic apparatus that reproduces inequities in schools and communities. Before moving into social science research and policy analysis, he taught rhetoric and composition at The New School, and was the Academic Director of Bard Early College in New Orleans. (PhD, University of Illinois, Chicago; MFA, The New School; BA, Eugene Lang College).
 

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Adam Ruderman

Adam Ruderman is an Upper School History and English Instructor at Parker School in Waimea, on The Big Island of Hawaii. Adam has previously taught at Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, California, Breck School in Golden Valley, Minnesota, Bishop's School in San Diego, California, and at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii. Adam has attended numerous Bard IWT workshops which have been instrumental in his mission as a teacher: to create spaces of empathy and authenticity where students can find and enhance their voices through writing, thinking and discussion. Adam's areas of interest include the study of deliberative procedures, group dynamics and democratic processes and has done primary research in the field. He has presented on how writing deepens the discourse in discussion-based classrooms at conferences including the People of Color Conference, the Minnesota Association of Independent Schools, and the National Association of Independent Schools, has consulted with English and History departments about developing writing and discussion-based pedagogy, and has created a YouTube channel (Discussion Based Teaching Explained) which explores the interaction of writing and discussion in a classroom. Adam holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from San Diego State University as well as an M.A from Tulane University School of Public Health, and an M.S. from the University of Hawaii. He lives in Waimea with his wife Vanessa and his son Ty. 

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Tyler T. Schmidt

Tyler T. Schmidt is an assistant professor of English and co-coordinator of the WAC program at Lehman College, CUNY. His recent book, *Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature* (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) investigates cross-race writing, interracial sexuality, and queer identity in post-WWII American poetry and fiction from 1945-1955. Research interests include 20th-century African American literature, interracial cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and composition/rhetoric. His critical work has appeared in *African American Review*, *Women Studies Quarterly*, and *Radical Teacher*. Schmidt has worked as a teacher-consultant for the New York City Writing Project where he also coordinated a summer youth writers’ institute for NYC public school students. He also teaches courses on American literature for the Bard Prison Initiative. 

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Brian Schwartz

Brian Schwartz is a Clinical Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and has also taught at Bard, U.C. Irvine, San Francisco State and at the Fir Acres Workshop at Lewis and Clark. He has published fiction and non-fiction in Harvard Review, Ascent, TIMBER and other journals, and his story "Invasion" was 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. (B.A., Brandeis University; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine; Ph.D., New York University.)

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Jane Smith

Jane Smith is Continuing Assistant Professor of Humanities and Associate Director for Library Writing Support at Bard College. At the college since 2004, she teaches a variety of undergraduate courses, runs programs to support thesis-writing seniors, and coaches student writers one-on-one. Among her interests are seventeenth-century British literature and history, early modern popular culture, and film. She holds a B.S.Ed. and an M.A. from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.

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Gian Starr

Gian Starr is the Assistant Principal at Stissing Mountain Jr./Sr. High School in Pine Plains, NY. Prior to this he was an English Language Arts Teacher in Secondary Education, working across grade levels in rural, urban, and suburban settings throughout New York’s Hudson Valley before earning tenure as a 7^th grade ELA teacher in Pine Plains. Gian is a Fellow of the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, where he has led workshops for international students and has mentored a number of MAT teacher candidates. He has worked with the New York State Department of Education in developing their Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Framework and serves on a stakeholder panel for the redevelopment of assessment and teacher evaluation practices in New York State. He lives with his wife, son, cat, and turkey in New Paltz, NY.
 

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Holly Swain Ewald

Holly Swain Ewald, PhD, is a biologist and STEM teacher with research specialization in infectious disease, cancer, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Her work explores the role of evolution in both acute and chronic disease and her publications are at the interface of biology and health sciences. She has an adjunct appointment at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and has also taught at Simmons College, a small Historically Black College and University, and in the Bard Citizen Science program. She is particularly interested in questions of health inequity and the role of science education in helping individuals shape their own interests and impact policy.

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Peter Trachtenberg

Peter Trachtenberg holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from the City College of New York. He is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, The Book of Calamities, and Another Insane Devotion. His new book, The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York, will be published in March 2025 by Black Sparrow Press. His fiction, reporting, and essays can be found in The New Yorker, New York, Harpers, Guernica, and VQR, as well as on his Substack Not Dark Yet. He is an associate professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and former core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He’s also taught in Bard’s Language & Thinking Project, in the graduate writing program of the City College of New York, and at St. Mary’s College of California.

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Robin Tremblay-McGaw lives in San Francisco and teaches at Santa Clara University and in Bard’s Language & Thinking Program.  She is the co-editor with Rob Halpern of From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (ON Contemporary Practice, 2017). Her book of poems, Dear Reader (Ithuriel's Spear), came out in August 2015. Some recent published work and talks include: “A Short Talk on a Long Topic: Whiteness in Poetry, Art, and Film: A Talk on a Poem in-Progress: Benjamin Moore’s White” (SCU Center for Arts and Humanities, May 2020); Poetry, Podcasts and Pop Culture: Emily Dickinson: Race, Class, and Queer Love;  “A Made Up Thing” Full of Depth: The Queer Belonging of Robert Duncan and New Narrative, in Sillages critiques, December 2020; “Archive” a poem in Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, a special issue: Writing in the Pause, October 2020;  a poem/essay “the queen’s english ain’t her own” in Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry/philosophy/performativity, edited by Kyoo Lee, Roof Books, 2020; '“A Real Fictional Depth”: Transtexuality & Transformation in Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe in Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics.' Medieval Institute Publications (2022); an article “Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey’s Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run”  in the Journal of Narrative Theory, Winter 2022. B.A., English, the University of New Hampshire; M.A. English, San Francisco State University; M.L.I.S. University of California, Berkeley; PhD. Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Robert Tynes

Robert Tynes is a political scientist whose research includes political violence, African politics, child soldiers, and internet activism. His most recent book, Tools of War, Tools of State, (SUNY Press), argues that child soldiers on the battlefield bolster troop size, create moral dilemmas, and deepen the level of fear. Tynes has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, Air & Space Power Journal, African Security Review, The Journal of Sierra Leone Studies, New Media & Society, and limn. Tynes is currently the Director of Research and a Site Director for the Bard Prison Initiative. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University at Albany and an M.A. in communications from the University of Washington.

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Teresa Vilardi

Teresa Vilardi was assistant director of IWT from 1984 until 2001, and director from 2001 until 2012. She served as the liaison between IWT and Bard's MAT program, developing training workshops for both MAT faculty and IWT faculty. She earned her B.A. at Barnard College and M.A. in medieval and Renaissance history from Columbia University, and studied in the Program in Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She taught history at the State University of New York in Binghamton; the College of Wooster in Ohio; Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York; history and women's studies at Broome County Community College in Binghamton; and taught in Bard’s Freshman Seminar Program. She was co-editor of New Methods in College Writing Programs: Theories in Practice (MLA, 1986); Writing to Learn Mathematics and Science (Teachers College Press, 1989); and Writing-Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions (SUNY Press, 2009). Teresa passed away in 2021. The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship is dedicated to her memory.

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Meghann Walk

Meghann Walk is a doctoral candidate in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership and was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Public Humanities at the University of Illinois. Her scholarship explores information literacy instruction, early college high schools, and the public humanities. She has taught Writing & Thinking for several years as the writing instructor for the Odyssey Project at the University of Illinois and, prior to that, as the Library Director and a social studies instructor at Bard High School Early College-Manhattan. (CAS, St. John’s University; MSLIS, Simmons College; BA, University of Illinois)

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Peter Wallace

Peter Wallace is a long-time faculty associate of the Bard Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Bard Language & Thinking Program. He is a novelist, and the former Chair of the Theater Program at Eugene Lang College of New School University in New York and directed theater in New York and around the US. He taught and directed at Princeton, Yale, and Trinity Rep. Through IWT, he has taught writing practices in Myanmar, Turkey, and Russia, and received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and The Millay Colony for the Arts. He has a B.A. from Middlebury College, and an M.F.A. in Directing from Yale School of Drama.

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Nicole B. Wallack

Nicole B. Wallack, PhD, is the Director of Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she has worked since 2003. At Columbia, she teaches seminars on writing pedagogy, American literature and film, Creative Nonfiction, and undergraduate writing courses. Nicole has been an Associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking since 1998. Nicole’s scholarship focuses on the history and aesthetics of the American essay, rhetoric and composition, teacher education, educational history, standardized testing, and knowledge transfer. Her articles include “Revealing Our Values: Reading Student Texts with Colleagues in High School and College,” which appears in *Teaching with Student Texts* (Utah State University Press, 2010). In this essay, she reports from surveys of high school and college teachers who have participated in the IWT’s workshops about their expectations for students’ academic writing. Her book, *Crafting Presence in American Essays*, offers theoretical and pedagogical arguments for rethinking the role of essay writing in high school and college in the age of the Common Core State Standards and the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. Nicole is the Vice President of the Council of Writing Program Administrator’s Metro Affiliate group, and sits on the Committee for Contingent Labor in the Profession for the Modern Language Association.

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William Webb

William Webb is the co-director of The Field Semester in Northern, California. He is currently the West Coast Coordinator of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. During his 24 years in education, he has worked as a school chaplain, a humanities teacher, a middle school and high school director, and as the director of classroom practice for Bard’s MAT program in Delano, California. In his work for IWT he has taught at Al-Quds University in Palestine, St John’s College in Santa Fe, University of Texas in Houston, in the Sacramento Public School District, and was co-creator and co-leader of an NEH-sponsored series on teaching sacred texts in the classroom. He earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his Master’s in Theology from Loyola Marymount College.  He has published essays in Field Notes, The NAIS Magazine, La Voz, and Anthem.

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Robert D. Whittemore

Robert Whittemore is Professor of Anthropology at Western Connecticut State University. After serving as a Peace Corps Rural Development Volunteer in Senegal, he taught and then became educational director for the Brockton Child Development Center in Massachusetts. His subsequent ethnographic writing—with Elizabeth Beverly—is based on their shared six-year collaboration with the Mandinka of the Casamance region in Senegal. He also did epidemiological fieldwork on crack cocaine and community in Portland, Oregon, as well as with developmentally challenged adults, writing about their independent accomplishments living in urban Los Angeles. As an Associate of Bard IWT since 1986, he established and directed for 29 years one of the summer-residency programs for high school youth, part of the IWT’s National Writing & Thinking Network (NwtNet). At WCSU, he explores his discipline’s literature and practice, invested as they are in the relationship between writing and discovery, thereby demonstrating the importance of an ethnographic sensibility among students whose global citizenship will be essential to their future well-being. His wife, Elizabeth is a poet, playwright and novelist. Their eldest daughter, Miranda, is a novelist; their youngest, Vanessa Kai, is a visual artist and filmmaker.  (A.B. Harvard College; M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles.)

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Dumaine Williams

Dumaine Williams (B.A., Bard College, M.A., Montclair State University, Ph.D., Stony Brook University) is Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the Early College for Bard College. He has led Language & Thinking and IWT workshops for faculty and students at several college and early college campuses and teacher certification and in-service training workshops for faculty in various school districts. Dumaine's area of focus at IWT is writing to learn in STEM disciplines and his areas of research and teaching include endocrinology, epidemiology and health inequality. 

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Valerie Carr Zakovitch

Valerie Carr Zakovitch teaches English language and literature at IASA, a high school for gifted students in Israel, and is an English editor and translator. In a previous life, she was a student of ancient Jewish and Christian literature and beliefs (B.A. Brown University, M.A. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), a field that continues to interest her. She is a cofounder of the IASA
Institute for the Teaching of Humanities, through which she and her colleagues offer writing-and-thinking workshops to teachers in the Israeli educational system.