Newsmakers

Bard College alumni/ae Catherine Lamb MFA ’12, Berlin-based composer, and Ben Richter ’08, director of Ghost Ensemble, have released a new collaborative album called interius/exterius, which was engineered by Bard music faculty Matt Sargent and mixed at Bard’s recording studio. The work, which Igloo Magazine calls “a vast, resonant world of sound, where every listening reveals infinite layers of beauty,” is currently in first-round Grammy consideration in the categories of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and Best Engineered Album, Classical. “A stellar recording,” wrote Peter Margasak for Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical roundup about Catherine Lamb x Ghost Ensemble’s LP. “This stands as one of more electrifying accounts of [Lamb’s] sound world. It’s thrilling to witness over the last few years how Lamb’s harmonic imagination and compositional voice have been reinforcing one another as they grow inexorably more refined and powerful.” The first round of Grammy voting ends on Oct 15.

The Naming Song, the newest novel by author and Bard alumnus Jedediah Berry ’99, was awarded the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award for fiction. The Massachusetts Book Awards recognize works by current Commonwealth residents in multiple categories. “I was so pleased to see my book included among a list of so many extraordinary writers’ works who I admire,” Berry said to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “Winning it was just an astonishing thing. I felt incredibly grateful.”

The Naming Song, also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is a fabulist novel that takes place after an apocalyptic event makes names disappear. The novel’s protagonist works for “the Names Committee” as a courier, delivering names to their proper places. “I came to love these characters and the strange journey that they’re on in the book,” Berry said. “Living with that for so long and knowing that it’s finally out of the world is kind of a strange experience. It’s like finally introducing people to these old friends.”