News and Events

See all News and Events

A Reading by Elizabeth Hand
The Nebula and World Fantasy Award–winning author reads from Saffron and Brimstone
Monday, November 13, 2017
2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
[A Reading by Elizabeth Hand] On Monday, November 13, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, the fantasy writer and critic Elizabeth Hand reads from her fiction collection Saffron and Brimstone. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Bard's literary journal, Conjunctions, will be giving away copies of its Other Aliens issue, coedited by Hand and Morrow.

Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college a couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and New York. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum before returning to university to study cultural anthropology. Her many books include Hard Light, Radiant Days, Available Dark, Generation Loss, and Ilyria. Her fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards, and her novels have been chosen as notable books by the New York Times and Washington Post. Hand also writes spin-offs, tie-ins, and novelizations of such films as X-Files, Stars Wars, and 12 Monkeys; and contributed a take on the Bride of Frankenstein to Dark Horse Comics' series of classic movie monster novels.

PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH HAND

"Waking the Moon is a potent socio-erotic ghost story[, while] Elizabeth Hand's Cass Neary novels, rightly praised for their icy tension and remarkable darkness, are threaded, like the best of punk in any medium, on a bloodied yet admirably stubborn humanism." —William Gibson

"Hand's work is pulsing with tension throughout, charged with its own chilling luminosity." ―Washington Post

"Elizabeth Hand's prose is a wiry, intelligent force that ranges from blunt athleticism to fluid luminosity. The propulsive power of her narrative is all the more stunning for her meticulous observation of sensory detail, art, and the human complexity it reveals. Ferocious, aching with compassion and cruelly brilliant, Available Dark is a sinful pleasure." ―Katherine Dunn

"Poignant and terrifying by turns, Last Summer at Mars Hill isn't for the easily shocked, but it will satisfy readers who long for rich prose and deep, dark dreams." —Publishers Weekly

Any supporter who donates $500 or more to Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions receives a BackPage Pass providing VIP access to any Fall 2017 or future event in the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Have lunch with a visiting author, attend a seminar on their work, and receive premium seating at their reading. Or you can give your BackPage Pass to a lover of literature on your gift list! To find out more, click here or contact Nicole Nyhan at [email protected] or (845) 758-7054.

Contact: Nicole Nyhan, [email protected], 845-758-7054
http://elizabethhand.com/

Connect

e-mail
Submissions

In Print

Vol. 79
Conjunctions:79
Onword
Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

Zeaz, Soldite, and Nephosa
by Vi Khi Nao
March 29, 2023
He had understood marriage as a way for people to be close together by maximizing their respective, individual isolation. He suspected that people got married so that the mirror of blame and excuses could point away from their respective selves, a way of blindly dismissing their own accountability. Had they been alone, they would have been forced to face their own terrors and demons. They would, at least, have tried to tackle some of their weaknesses instead of directing the velocity of their failure toward their “seemingly” innocent spouse. Zeaz understood this on a fundamental level and so, in the Year of the Tiger, he prepared legal papers to divorce his white wife and faced what he feared the most: himself, a biracial man with intermittent epileptic episodes, who was less dominant than a leaf.
Tears Cycle: Companion Peace
by Tracie Morris
March 22, 2023
To survive sadly is still. 
At a boat’s bottom, allegedly a boat. 
Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. 
Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. 
The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. 
Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus. 

Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. 
No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. 
No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam. 

We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
Hunger
by Shane Kowalski
March 15, 2023
He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit.