"Do texts evade or do they tell? This question drives my writing and art."  "Somewhat ironically, my work challenges inscription itself; my text and image works record micro-level responses to the supposed solidity of institutional language, built spaces, and ideologies. Often taking the form of hybrid works—combining lyricism and exposition, text and visual art—my works argue for the limits of words, the fact of the impure genre, the presence of silence, and the history of attempts to inscribe contested sites of knowledge." | Jill Magi, writer, visual artist, and educator, is the author of Threads (Futurepoem), Torchwood (Shearsman Books), and the chapbook Cadastral Map (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Her visual work, essays, poems, and prose have appeared in HOW2, The Tiny, The New Review of Literature, Aufgabe, Jacket, anthologized in Fiction from the Brooklyn Rail (Hanging Loose Press), as well as in the forthcoming books Letters to Poets: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Press), The Eco-Language Reader (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and the 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets (Outside Voices). Jill’s visual work has been exhibited at the International Meeting of Visual Poetry, the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 2007 Open Studios, where Jill was one of two writers-in-residence. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches at The Eugene Lang College of The New School, City College, and Goddard College. From 2002-2008, she facilitated Sona Books, a community-based chapbook press. View a complete artist resume here. |
Bio and Artist Resume |
 "As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, 'When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.' When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets--no matter the medium--who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling." -from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley |