Hannah Arendt Center Presents

The Bill Mullen Recitation Prize

It's time for the annual poetry recitation prize contest. Any current Bard student is eligible to enter. First Place, $500; Second Place, $100! Enter by April 23, 2026.

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The Bill Mullen Recitation Contest encourages the love of literature, the joy in oral recitation, the committing to memory of great poetry, the love of public speaking, and the agonal spirit, all of which are at the heart of how we remember Bill Mullen’s intellectual legacy. The Bill Mullen Recitation Contest aims to expose students to, and perhaps instill a love for, the art of memorizing and reciting poetry.

Rules of Competition:
- Participants must be undergraduates at Bard College.
- Poem must be recited in English (translations into English are welcome).
- The poem’s author must be deceased.
- Full texts only, no excerpts.
- Recitation length: no longer than 3 minutes (time yourself in a practice run).
- If the number of applicants exceeds the slots available, applicants will be selected on a “first come” basis.
- Entry deadline: April 23, 2026.

Prizes:
$500 1st place
$100 2nd place

Refreshments will be served.

Who was Bill Mullen?
William "Bill" Mullen (1956-2017) came to Bard College in 1985 and was a key figure in establishing the College's Classics program. He taught at Bard until his death. In 2021 the College announced that a bequest from Professor Mullen's estate had established the William C. Mullen Memorial Fund, which sustains his legacy through grants to former students to continue their studies, and through the support of the Poetry Recitation Prize.

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Who are the Judges?
As a jazz musician and sound/text performer, Michael Ives' work with the performance trio, F'loom, was featured on National Public Radio, the CBC, and in various international anthologies of sound poetry. As a member of F'loom, he shared the stage with a wide range of artists, including Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin, and Margaret Atwood. He has taught music performance and composition and creative writing at the Aesthetic Education Institute of Lincoln Center and was artist in residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of The Extenal Combustion Engine, Wavetable, The Ghost in the Field, and Oh Shining Nations, So Distant, So Real. His poetry, prose, and fiction have appearance in numerous periodicals. He has taught in the Written Arts Program at Bard College since 2003 where he is a poet-in-residence.

Ann Lauterbach is the author of eleven poetry collections, several chapbooks, and three works of prose, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. Her Or to Begin Again was nominated for a National Book Award, and her most recent book, Door (2023), was a finalist for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She has written about the visual arts, including essays on Felix Gonzales Torres and Mina Loy, and was a recipient of a New York Council of the Arts grant in 2025 for her project The Meanwhile. Among her awards are grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation She was co-chair of Writing in Bard’s MFA from 1992 to 2020, and is Bard’s David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts). 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822.

Time: 1:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bard Hall

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