Learning
Header image from Sossussvlei, Namibia, 2000
Lincoln Center Education
Teaching Artist Leadership Lab
Learned alongside this beautiful group of teaching artists from across the globe in a two-week intensive led by Eric Booth and Jean Taylor. Putting the intense in intensive. Summer 2019.
Columbia University
Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program is an “interdisciplinary MA degree training students in oral history method and theory. Through the creation, archiving and analysis of individual, community and institutional histories, we amplify the critical first-person narratives that constitute memory for generations to come.” Earned my MA part-time over three years, submitting my thesis, a collaborative oral history project with self-advocates with Down syndrome, in October 2013.
Center for the Study of Social Difference
Graduate Fellow, Future of Disability Studies
The Future of Disability Studies approached disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity; it explored some of the key debates within Disability Studies and identified new directions for the future of the field.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference is an interdisciplinary research center supporting collaborative projects that address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.
Sarah Lawrence College
I studied in the Master of Fine Arts Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College from 2006 - 2009, earning my MFA in Fiction and lifelong friends, colleagues, and commitment to my writing practice.
Teach for America
At the tender age of 21, I joined TFA in the hopes of addressing systemic racial and class inequality in America. I found myself teaching fourth grade at San Antonio Elementary School in San Jose, California, to this gorgeous group of bi- and trilingual students who taught me at least as much as they learned. I remember them each vividly, some twenty years later.
Lannan Poetry Fellowship
I was a 2000 - 2001 Lannan Poetry Fellow at Georgetown University, which “encourages dynamic critical thinking and creativity with a view to examining literary forms and practices; the work of individual authors; the relationship between writing and other arts; and the place of writing in contemporary culture. Fellows study and discuss the work of the year’s scheduled guests in the Lannan “Readings and Talks” series in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library, participate in conversations with the guests, and attend their readings and performances.” Under the mentorship and tutelage of poet Mark McMorris, we studied, among others, Billy Collins, Robert Creeley, Kamau Braithwaite, Marie Waldrop, Marie Howe, Alice Notley, Lee Ann Brown, Anslem Berrigan and Elizabeth Alexander.
University of Cape Town
From January - July 2000, I studied at UCT in South Africa, in an experienced that profoundly changed and politicized me. It was there, just six years after Mandela’s election, in the afterlife of apartheid, where I began my true education in the line my own country is written on, and I came home to study comparative history of the US and South Africa.
McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies
Alanya, Turkey
From January - June 1999, I studied the history, culture, language and archeology of Anatolia in this Ottoman villa, within a Seljuk castle, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
My undergraduate education was at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where I majored in Culture and Politics, an interdisciplinary, humanities-focused program where we grappled with questions of culture, knowledge and power. (I loved it.) I earned my Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service in 2001.
Photo of Jackson in Dahlgren square, on a visit back to campus with me in 2008.
Georgetown Outdoor Adventure Training
I was a member of the first graduating class of Georgetown’s Outdoor Adventure Training program, backpacking in the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, working as a student guide on a backpacking trip in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, and earning my certification as a Wilderness First Responder.
Photo of me in the Gila Wilderness, 1998.