Our online network is designed to connect current Bard parents, grandparents, and guardians. Annandale Insider, a monthly e-newsletter containing the latest campus news, notifications of family events, and volunteer/mentorship opportunities, keeps our families informed about student life in Annandale.
Annual Events
Family Leadership Council
Members of the Family Leadership Council (FLC) play a leadership role in the Bard community through a range of activities. FLC members develop and participate in on-campus and regional recruiting and mentoring events, promote and provide career opportunities for students, and participate in peer-to-peer fundraising. Parents on the FLC play a role in the success of the Bard College Fund through annual gifts. The Family Leadership Council meets twice each year: once during Family Weekend in the fall and once in the spring. These meetings are open so all Bard families are welcome to attend.
Visiting Us
Bard College campus grounds in Annandale are open to the community. Visitors who are vaccinated and boosted are welcome in campus facilities (except residence halls and the gym, which remain off limits to visitors) with advance approval from the Response Team.
Donna Ford Grover, visiting associate professor of literature and American studies. Photo by Chris Kayden
Faculty in the News
Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors.
Academic Calendar
The Bard Academic Calendar is an important resource for use throughout the year.
Stay in Touch
Keep your records up to date. If you have updates or changes to your contact information, please email [email protected].
The Family Programs Office sends out a monthly e-newsletter, Annandale Insider, as well as important messages from the College and news on networking events, student and faculty achievements, and more.
The Family Programs Office sends out a monthly e-newsletter, Annandale Insider, as well as important messages from the College and news on networking events, student and faculty achievements, and more.
News and Events
Alumna Sun-Ly Pierce VAP ’19 Receives Music Academy of the West's 2026 Alumni Performance Award
Pierce, a mezzo-soprano, will make her recital debut at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on April 15th, 2027.
Alumna Sun-Ly Pierce VAP ’19 Receives Music Academy of the West's 2026 Alumni Performance Award
Sun-Ly Pierce VAP ’19.
The mission of the Bard College Conservatory of Music is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.
Post Date: 05-12-2026
New Book by Andrew Durbin ’12 Reviewed in Several Publications
"Durbin’s careful analysis, especially of Thek’s work, is essential,” the Atlantic writes.
New Book by Andrew Durbin ’12 Reviewed in Several Publications
L-R: Andrew Durbin ’12 (photo by Jeff Henrikson) and his book, The Wonderful World That Almost Was.
Post Date: 05-06-2026
Bard College Faculty M. Gessen and Alumna Juliana Spahr ’88 Win Pulitzer Prizes
This year’s Pulitzer Prize recipients will constitute the 109th class of Pulitzer Prize winners.
Bard College Faculty M. Gessen and Alumna Juliana Spahr ’88 Win Pulitzer Prizes
L–R: M. Gessen, distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, and Bard alumna Juliana Spahr ’88.
The Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing is awarded for distinguished editorials, columns or other written commentary containing well-reasoned and compelling arguments on topics of public interest, whether originally researched and reported or informed by personal experience. Gessen’s series of New York Times Opinion articles, including “This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well,” “How to be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” and “The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump,” demonstrate clarity, moral purpose, sound logic, engaging prose, and power to influence public opinion.
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, conferred for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, recognizes Spahr’s collection of lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism. “In both her poetry and her academic work, Spahr takes as her central concern the relationship between literature and the state,” writes the New York Times about Ars Poeticas. “Accordingly, in this book, her sixth collection of poems, she writes about everything from climate change to the rise of the alt-right.”
M. Gessen is a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College and an Opinion columnist for the New York Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024, and are the author of 11 non-fiction books, including most recently Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead Books, June 2020); The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said, “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” They are the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Juliana Spahr ’88 is a poet and scholar whose interests revolve around questions of transformation, language, and ecology. Spahr’s work crosses a variety of American landscapes, from the disappearing beaches of Hawaii to the small town of her Appalachian childhood. Her poems have focused on reading as a “communal, democratic, and open processm,” and her many books of poetry include That Winter the Wolf Came (2015); Well Then There Now (2011); The Transformation (2007); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005); Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (2003); and Response (1996), which won a National Poetry Series Award. Spahr has also edited several volumes of essays and poetry, including Writing from the New Coast: Technique (1993); A Poetics of Criticism (1994); American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), with Claudia Rankine; and Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (2006). Spahr won the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. The prize, presented by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is given to US poets “whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.” Spahr has taught at Siena College and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is currently an associate professor of English at Mills College.
Post Date: 05-06-2026