teach.

find one. pick one.

An old mentor once told me that one of the most important things I would do as an author is decide what kind of literary citizen I wanted to be. In the arts, she explained, this citizenship is essential. It protects the integrity of our craft, pays it forward, fills economic gaps and can also offer much-needed emotional support to a community that often demands isolation. "It can be blurbing, writing groups, philanthropy, teaching, activism. Find one. Pick one," she said.

I chose the one most familiar to me: teaching. Both my parents are professors, and my mother currently serves as a university president in Liberia. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, family friends who filled our living room with wild lectures and debates on everything from theology to African liberation. Inspired by all of it, I eventually attended Columbia University Teachers College and earned a master's degree in education with a focus on cultural anthropology.

For years, I taught in the Africana Studies department at CUNY's John Jay College, loving every breath of those lectures and, just as much, my students. Somehow, that excitement took a while to reach the writing classroom. When my debut novel was published in 2018, the invitations to teach began to arrive. Many were one-off lectures and speaking contracts, but others were offers to join the faculties of MFA writing programs. (My first master's degree was in creative writing, and because it is a terminal degree, I qualify for professorships and sometimes tenure-track roles in most creative writing programs.) I have taught in several of these programs, with a wide range of experiences and students. Some of my former students have gone on to become award-winning writers. Others filled my inbox with epistles about how much more critical I should have been of their work. (More on that, and my own MFA trauma, in another post.)

The truth is, I do not believe you can teach someone how to be a good storyteller. I do believe you can teach craft, and in some cases it can be taught extraordinarily well. And if students push themselves to experience more of life, traveling, making friends outside their comfort zone, engaging with other arts, good stories can grow from that. This tension sits at the center of my thinking about the industry. Can writing be taught?

***

I am teaching writing again.

Earlier this year, I spoke with that old mentor about my upcoming novel, HABILA. "And will you teach?" she asked, as we discussed my "return" to a career that half a decade of motherhood and homemaking had overshadowed. Passing along what I have learned and lived, she believes, matters in a canon with so few voices like mine.

So I said yes. There is something breathtaking about a person's first steps into the world of words. And while I carry some anxiety about doing justice to their wonder, about their career expectations, about how they'll manage their relationship with their own art; I know, I know, I know, fully, the thrill of reaching the peak of a student's ability.

With that said:

1) I am currently in Vienna, Austria, as new faculty for Cedar Crest, a low-residency MFA program that spends two weeks in Europe each summer and mentors students throughout the school year. Low-res programs are wonderful for beginning writers who can't commit to a full-time schedule. I was also a founding faculty member of the low-res MFA program at Randolph College in Virginia. You can search for low-residency MFA programs through Poets & Writers HERE using their filtering system.

2) I've also started an independent program offering single-session intensives in both fiction and nonfiction, encouraging students to explore the meeting point of mythical storytelling and craft. I first shared it with my immediate network and former students, but there seems to be real appetite for workshops centering magical realism, so I wanted to reach a wider community. The first nonfiction cohort is nearly full, but there is still room in the fiction workshop, which runs in August. The course also comes with a one-on-one assessment. I made a promise to myself to live more boldly this year, and I hope to meet some of you who want to dive deeper into your own intrigue with magical realism and writing. You can find details about the courses below and also HERE & HERE.