BA in Individualized Studies Program
For the last ten years, I have taught creative writing, literature, and literary publishing in college programs in New York City. For several years I was an academic advisor in a worker education program, and I got my start in teaching and writing at a community-based literacy program in Brooklyn where we, as teachers, believed that “to teach it you have to do it.” My interest in writing came from my involvement in that community of teachers and learners intent on writing down their stories.
I’ve been an active member of the New York City poetry and art scene for several years and I run a community-based small press called Sona Books. My books of poetry include Threads—a hybrid work of poetry, prose, and images—and a collection of serial poems entitled Torchwood that is forthcoming in spring 2008. I’ve also exhibited drawings, collages, and video/installations at galleries and artist-run cooperatives in Brooklyn where I live. Last year I was a resident with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and continue to work with them as they develop their writer-in-resident program alongside their program for visual artists.
I enjoy encouraging learners to access alternative sense-making spaces within language—spaces outside of traditional logic, explanation, and linearity. This idea of language probably comes from one of my first language memories of listening to my loved ones carry on in their home language, Estonian, and though nothing was translated for me, I loved hearing their sounds and being a witness to that intimate encounter created by language itself. So I delight in those workshop and classroom moments when we encounter a combination of words that puzzles all of us, but also makes more sense than we could have ever imagined. My approach to facilitating writing is to encourage experimentation and to fashion a space that is both challenging and supportive. About 17 years ago I first read Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and knew that I wanted to teach. I respect and cherish the community that is created when learners gather—it’s invigorating and inspires me continually.
My interests circulate around hybrid texts—works that blur boundaries between fiction, poetry, the essay, visual poetry, and image; the politics of inscription and traditions of resistance to inscription; social memory and landscaped sites of memory; critical race theory; documentary and investigative art practices; eco-poetical concerns and the North American nature writing tradition; working people’s art expressions; gender and writing, postcolonial theory, and narrative structure.
Educational Background: BA, Sociology, University of Maryland at College Park; graduate studies in sociology, The New School for Social Research; coursework in painting and sculpture, The School of the Visual Arts; MA, English/Creative Writing, The City College of the City University of New York.
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Jill Magi, MA