BFA in Creative Writing Program
For the last twelve years, I have taught creative writing, literature, literary publishing, and cultural studies 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. Other works have been included in the anthologies Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community and Fiction from the Brooklyn Rail. I’ve also exhibited drawings, collages, and video/installations at galleries and artist-run cooperatives in Brooklyn where I live. In 2006-07 I was a resident with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and continue to work with visual artists on collaborations of text and image.
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 creative and intellectual interests hover 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 and African-American literature; documentary art practices; eco-poetical concerns and the North American nature writing tradition; working people’s art expressions; gender and writing; and postcolonial theory. Though I do not have advanced degrees in the visual arts and social sciences, I’ve taken graduate-level anthropology and sociology courses at the New School for Social Research, as well as drawing, painting, and sculpture classes at School of the Visual Arts and The City College.
Educational Background: MFA in Creative Writing, Goddard College; MA in English, The City College of the City University of New York; BA in Sociology, University of Maryland at College Park.
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Jill Magi, MFA, MA