Bard Fiction Prize

Bard Fiction Prize is sponsored by Bard College. A writer-in-residence award for an emerging American fiction writer aged 39 or under to devote a semester to a fiction project. The recipient is required to give one public lecture and meet informally with students.

What Is the Bard Fiction Prize? The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded to a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a $30,000 cash award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses.

The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students. Eliza Barry Callahan. Photo by E.

Josey Eliza Barry Callahan, 2026 Bard Fiction Prize Recipient Author Eliza Barry Callahan has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult Books, 2024). Callahan’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2026 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Callahan will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

Learn More About the Author Eliza Barry Callahan, 2026 Bard Fiction Prize Recipient The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Eliza Barry Callahan’s novel The Hearing Test begins, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis , with a character waking up in the morning having mysteriously, existentially changed overnight: ‘I had been struck by Sudden Deafness.

’ As the unnamed narrator navigates a medical labyrinth hoping to cure her abrupt hearing loss, she thinks: she thinks about sound, she thinks about silence, she thinks about noise, signal, and music, and the ranges between them. It is a novel of ideas, in which the ideas are not decorative elements or passengers in the vehicle but the story’s essential characters, the active agents driving the narrative.

It’s a novel that blurs the lines between fiction and essay and between internal and external, in pitch-perfect prose that uses precision as a form of lyricism and vibrates in the inner ear like the tines of a tuning fork. ” “To be read with closeness and care is an ultimate gift,” said Callahan.

“Rivaling that gift is the gift of time, and rivaling the gift of time is the gift of space, and well, of course the gift of the gift… To receive this is an honor. I am grateful for (and excitedly await) the opportunity to commune with and work on my second novel next fall alongside the students and faculty at Bard. ” Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY.

Her debut novel, The Hearing Test , published in Spring 2024 (Catapult) was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Awar and longlisted for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and writing about art has appeared in The Paris Review , Bomb , frieze , and The Drift .

Her 20 minute directorial debut, ‘The Non-Actor’, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2025. She was a 2023 New York Foundation of The Arts Fellow and currently teaches a seminar on artist writings and ekphrasis at Columbia University.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s longstanding position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students.

From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment.

Bard Invites Submissions for Its Annual Fiction Prize for Young Writers To apply, candidates should write a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard and submit a CV, along with three copies of the published book they feel best represents their work. No manuscripts will be accepted. Applications for the 2027 prize must be received by June 1, 2026.

For information about the Bard Fiction Prize, call 845-758-7087, send an email to [email protected] . Applicants may also request information by writing to: Bard Fiction Prize, Bard College, 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Bard Fiction Prize Winners Maya Binyam, 2025 Recipient Author Maya Binyam has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Hangman (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).

Binyam’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2025 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Binyam will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman intrigues from its opening sentence as it builds a mysterious Beckettesque world of dark comic disorientation, never allowing the reader to grow complacent as it explores the essence of belonging and displacement.

Cain’s infamous question to God in Genesis echoes in the reader’s mind as we watch Binyam’s unnamed narrator strive to be his brother’s finder, encountering innumerable obstacles in his once-familiar homeland. This existential quest makes us rebuild our assumptions from the ground up: what is a refugee? What is a family?

How do we find our way home? Binyam builds a universe of alluring elusivity with consummate authority. ” “I’m honored and overjoyed to have been read so generously by the judges of the Bard Fiction Prize,” said Binyam.

“Novel writing, for me, is fundamentally mysterious, strange, and almost impossible. This recognition makes it feel more possible, and inevitable, too. I’m very excited to join Bard’s literary community in the fall, and am beyond grateful for the opportunity to work on my second novel alongside its students and faculty.

Knowing I’ll have this time to write is a dream. ” Maya Binyam’s novel Hangman , which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at Claremont McKenna College. She lives in Los Angeles.

Zain Khalid, 2024 Recipient Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press 2022). Khalid’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2024 semester, during which time he will continue his writing and meet informally with students. Khalid will give a public reading at Bard during his residency.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another.

First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail.

Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West.

And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.

” “I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.

” Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive , won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Violet Kupersmith, 2023 Recipient Author Violet Kupersmith has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House 2021). Kupersmith’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2023 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kupersmith will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body never ceases to surprise, as it intertwines disparate time periods, locations, and cultures, not to mention realities, and its sentences are worlds in themselves,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee.

“She approaches her subject matter in fresh ways, and the novel’s otherworldly elements are expertly interwoven with the mundane, through an imagination truly rich and strange. This novel is sensual, it is visceral, it is outrageously comic. By turns, Kupersmith makes you squeamish with distaste, shivery with terror, giddy with laughter, awestruck by beauty, and warmed by unexpected tenderness.

She always makes you marvel at her inventiveness, enticing you to solve the novel’s central mysteries, as she elicits the widest range of sensations possible. She is a writer of astonishing perspicacity and fluidity of language, and succumbing to her magic is a risk no reader should hesitate to take.

” “What a staggering honor to be in the company of all the literary luminaries who were previous winners of the award or have called Bard home at some point in their careers,” said Kupersmith. “I am just grateful beyond words to the prize committee for this recognition and for such an extraordinary gift.

And I cannot wait to plant myself in this fertile intellectual environment next fall and grow something strange and new. ” Violet Kupersmith was born in central Pennsylvania in 1989 and later moved with her family to the Philadelphia suburbs. Her father is a white American and her mother is from Da Nang, Vietnam.

Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the fall of Saigon in 1975, and were resettled in Port Arthur, Texas. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 2011, Violet spent a year teaching English in Tra Vinh, Vietnam, on a Fulbright Fellowship. Between 2013 and 2015, she lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam.

She was the 2015–2016 David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and is the recipient of a 2022 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her short story collection The Frangipani Hotel was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2014. violetkupersmith. com Lindsey Drager, 2022 Recipient Author Lindsey Drager has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc Books 2019).

Drager’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2022 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Drager will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Lindsey Drager’s wonderfully innovative novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings , takes its readers on an elliptical, speculative, philosophically intrepid journey that tracks the evolution of the old folktale, Hansel and Gretel, between 1378 and 2365, even as it redefines and revises our sense of what narrative itself can achieve,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee.

“As Halley’s Comet revisits the Earth every seventy-five years, like some cosmic metronome, we encounter the siblings Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Johannes Gutenberg and his sister, and twin space probes searching the galaxy for a sister planet to our own. As we do, we witness the many ways in which Hansel and Gretel themselves are transformed along with the human experience their tale portrays.

Intimate in its understanding of the multiplicities of love, here is an elegantly succinct work of art that is flat-out epic in scope.

And while one may look to Borges, Calvino, Winterson, even the Terrence Malik of Tree of Life for comparison, Drager’s vision is breathtakingly original and The Archive of Alternate Endings displays the confident technique and wild inventiveness of an already accomplished literary artist emerging into virtuosity.

” “I am so very, very grateful for the opportunity to spend a semester engaging with the literary community at Bard. It is a privilege to be listed among the extraordinary novelists and short story writers honored with this prize in the past,” said Drager. “For me, much of writing is about ongoing, long-term self-doubt, so support and recognition like this is simply invaluable.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the Bard Fiction Prize committee for seeing something in this strange book. ” Lindsey Drager is the author of three novels: The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc 2015), The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc 2017), and The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc 2019).

Her books have won a John Gardner Fiction Award and a Shirley Jackson Award; been listed as a “Best Book of the Year” in The Guardian and NPR; and twice been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A Spanish language edition of her second book was published this year in Spain, and an Italian edition of The Archive of Alternate Endings is forthcoming.

A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Prose, she is currently the associate fiction editor of the literary journal West Branch and an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Utah. Akil Kumarasamy, 2021 Recipient Author Akil Kumarasamy has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut story collection, Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018).

Kumarasamy’s one-semester residency at Bard College is scheduled for the 2021–22 academic year, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kumarasamy will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee.

“While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River —the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.

” “I’m very excited to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and to be part of the Bard community,” said Kumarasamy. “This has been such a whirlwind of a year, and, during these very uncertain times, I’m grateful for the support and the committee’s belief in my work. Really thrilled by the opportunity.

” Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.

Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine , American Short Fiction , Boston Review , among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans , is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Clare Beams, 2020 Recipient Author Clare Beams has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Beams will give a public reading at Bard in spring 2020.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned , range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination.

While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader.

Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose. ” “I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time.

To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams. Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned , which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W.

Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson , will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020.

Her fiction appears in One Story , n+1 , Ecotone , The Common , Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading , The Best American Nonrequired Reading , and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College. Greg Jackson, 2019 Recipient Author Greg Jackson has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his debut collection of short stories, Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

Jackson’s lyrical and unflinching stories map the degradations of contemporary life with insight and grace. His residency at Bard College is for the Spring 2019 semester, during which time Jackson will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The eight stories collected in Greg Jackson’s Prodigals take the reader all over the earth and across time, from a drug-addled weekend in Palm Springs to the remote provincial compound of a reclusive French tennis champion; a man drives into a hurricane with his psychiatrist, and a woman recounts a story about a summer spent painting dorm rooms in the summer of 1984 with a deranged coworker while Foucault dies and violent news from Central America hisses in the background.

These stories concern troubled and deeply human characters trapped in mirrored mazes of playfully structured narrative, written in electric and often hilarious sentences. Prodigals is a book that delights, disturbs, and surprises around every corner, with the hand of a masterful author always twisting the kaleidoscope to transform dazzling patterns of light, shape, and color before our eyes.

” “What a privilege and a thrill it is to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and join such an illustrious ensemble of past winners. For the support and vote of encouragement, I am deeply grateful to this year’s prize committee.

The chance to make Bard my home through the spring, to join its community and get to know its remarkable student body, is an incredible gift, and I look forward to the friendships and conversations I hope will develop over the course of my residency, as the days lengthen and spring descends on this sanctuary in the Hudson Valley,” says Jackson.

Greg Jackson’s fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker , Granta , Tin House , Virginia Quarterly Review , Vice , Los Angeles Times , Los Angeles Review of Book s, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center and MacDowell Colony.

A finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, he was chosen by Granta in 2017 for their decennial list of Best Young American Novelists. In 2016 he received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for Prodigals , a book that the New York Times called “so bold and perceptive that it delivers a contact high.

” He is currently at work on a novel, The Dimensions of a Cave , due out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which looks at the future of reporting, technology, and truth. Before turning to fiction, he worked as an investigative journalist in Washington, D. C.

Carmen Maria Machado, 2018 Recipient Author Carmen Maria Machado has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017) In the collection, long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Machado shapes startling, genre-bending narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

Machado’s residency at Bard College is for the Fall 2018 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The eight stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties range playfully from a brilliant riff on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to an apocalypse glimpsed incidentally through one woman’s sexual encounters to an obsessive exegesis of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that balloons into a hallucinatory, epic tapestry.

Machado’s stories are bizarre, hilarious, sexy, and addictively entertaining while troubling, complex ideas about femininity, queerness, gender, and sexuality lurk around the corner of every sentence. This book is an oddball masterpiece. ” “I’m incredibly honored to receive the Bard Fiction Prize, the former winners of which I’ve long admired.

I’m looking forward to joining the Bard community next fall, meeting the students I’ve heard so much about, and working on my essay collection and novel(s)-in-progress in the Hudson Valley as the weather turns,” says Machado. Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker , Granta, Tin House , Guernica , Electric Literature , NPR Books , and elsewhere.

Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy , Best Horror of the Year , Year’s Best Weird Fiction , and Best Women’s Erotica . Her memoir, House in Indiana , is forthcoming in 2019 from Graywolf Press. She holds an M.

F. A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Speculative Literature Foundation, Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. Karan Mahajan, 2017 Recipient Author Karan Mahajan has been selected to receive the Bard Fiction Prize for his novel The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016). A finalist for the 2016 National Book Award, Mahajan’s masterful narrative tells the story of two Delhi families ripped apart by a small bombing in a marketplace.

Woven around the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the gripping tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland. Mahajan’s residency at Bard College is for the Fall 2017 semester, during which time he will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes, “In a world where terrorism is a persistent, devastating reality, Karan Mahajan’s singular achievement with The Association of Small Bombs is to bring insight and empathy to all sides of the conflict, to the innocent and the perpetrators, their families, their friends.

His masterful narrative unfolds with the deaths of two schoolboys who with their companion, Mansoor Ahmed, are running a mundane errand in a Delhi marketplace, when a terrorist bomb is detonated. What follows is an ever-widening, compelling, and intricate story that portrays lives lived, on and off the grid, in the aftermath of this devastating act.

The Bard Fiction Prize judges agreed that The Association of Small Bombs is an unusually wise and humane novel and its author, Mahajan, possesses exceptional literary gifts, rich insights into even the most malign of his characters, and a clear-eyed, compassionate vision of this perilous aspect of our times.

” Mahajan says, “I’ve admired the eclectic list of Bard Fiction Prize winners for a long time and never imagined joining their ranks. So this is a real thrill and an honor. I’m excited to be back in the New York area, with its gorgeous, serious greenery and long tradition of nurturing writers like Bellow and Ellison.

I plan to work on my third novel at Bard and to generally infiltrate as many social and academic circles at the College as I can. ” Karan Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi, India. His first novel, Family Planning , was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was published in nine countries.

His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs , is a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards. His writing has appeared in the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , New Yorker online, the Believer , Paris Review Daily , Bookforum , and on NPR’s All Things Considered . A graduate of Stanford University and the Michener Center for Writers, he lives in Austin, Texas.

Alexandra Kleeman, 2016 Recipient Author Alexandra Kleeman has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2016. The prize, established in 2001 by Bard College to encourage and support promising young fiction writers, consists of a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence for one semester. Kleeman is receiving the prize for her debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Harper 2015).

Called “brilliant and disturbing” by the New York Times , Kleeman’s darkly allegorical satire follows a woman known only as A, who lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That’s My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges and watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials.

B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction. Meanwhile, her neighbors across the street are a family who have begun “ghosting” themselves beneath white sheets, and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one .

Kleeman’s residency at Bard College is for the spring 2016 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading. For more information, please call 845-758-7087. The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine wraps a nightmare inside absurdity.

It is a novel of alienation, paranoia, anxiety, and dread that puts a smile on your face. We live in a reality so sick and absurd already that satire has a hard time one-upping it these days, but Kleeman has done so in a way that is at once moving, haunting, hilarious, and surpassingly strange. It’s a novel about starvation that one reads with voracious hunger.

It makes you laugh and creeps you out, it disturbs and delights and keeps you rooted in your chair, flipping the pages, submerged, sunk, lost, enchanted. Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction is so dark and sad precisely because it is so uproariously funny. It’s the laughter of the doomed.

” Kleeman says, “I’m thrilled to be given this chance to participate in Bard’s thriving, innovative literary community—which I’ve admired from afar for so many years. The gift of time and support that the Bard Fiction Prize offers is a rare and precious thing, and I’m grateful to the prize committee for reading my work with such generosity and to Bard for offering this incredible opportunity.

The spring semester is still months away, but I’m already looking forward to meeting students and faculty, and melding our minds! ” Alexandra Kleeman has written for publications including the Paris Review , Zoetrope , Harper’s , Guernica , Tin House , Conjunctions , and n+1 .

She earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She is currently completing a Ph. D.

in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She lives in New York City. Laura van den Berg, 2015 Recipient Author Laura van den Berg has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2015.

The prize, established in 2001 by Bard College to encourage and support promising young fiction writers, consists of a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence for one semester. Van den Berg is receiving the prize for her book The Isle of Youth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). In this collection of stories, van den Berg explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception.

The characters in these stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless—grappling with the choices they have made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. Van den Berg’s residency at Bard College will be for the spring 2015