Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein

Artist Bio

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein is a poet, essayist, and arts educator. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Primavera, The Evansville Review, In Posse Review, La Petite Zine, Contrary Magazine, Konundrum Literary Engine, Horse Less Review, among others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award in Poetry (2002) and was a poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center (2006).

Amanda works as a teaching artist and arts education consultant with nationally recognized arts organizations such as Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts Education, The Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP), and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). She is co-editor of AIMPRINT: New relationships in the Arts and Learning, a collection of essays by Chicago artists and teachers on arts integrated teaching and learning. For over ten years she has led literary arts residencies in schools in over twenty-five schools in various cities and small towns around the country. Essays on teaching writing appear in Teaching Artist Journal, Teachers & Writers, Teaching Tolerance, and Art in the Public Interest.

Her research interests include curriculum theory, teaching artist identity, portraiture as social science, participatory poetics, the imagination, and the role of the artist in schools and society. In 2005, she and artist Rachel McIntire founded and co-direct BREAK ARTS, an international arts and education collaborative. In 2006, Amanda presented a paper on the significance of autobiography in arts and learning at the UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, Portugal. She holds a BA in English Literature from Kalamazoo College and a Masters degree in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

 Artist Statement

“All language is predicated on loss.” - Ted Aoki

“Everything is fleeing toward its presence.” - Roberto Juarroz

Poetry is a language I learned to speak at a very young age as a way to utter, reveal, and contend with reality and experience.  Rooted in traditions of confession and autobiography, I intentionally play with words & meaning, reveling in the neologistic madness of constructing a self.  I often find myself getting out of the way of myself when I write poetry — divining & devising, pulling toward & pushing out images that together reveal new meanings and demands. Poetry is the marriage of empty and full, a single word and the multiple meanings nested inside it.

My poems often address questions about desire & body, travel & exile, place & time, family & self — and the contradictions, failures, losses, and impossibilities therein.  I am in love with word mash ups, made up language, and audacious metaphor to communicate the ineffable in life — to make appear that which is not yet — to breathe life into a dead thing, resurrect the obscure, hidden, and too-large beauty of our time. As part of my writing practice, I am learning to stitch, sew, and fabricate books as its own kind of poem. I also orchestrate participatory poetics projects that encourage communication and exchange among the disparate and distant — guttural utterances of interior spaces made visible by the restraints and invitations of a particular project. I’ve recently fallen in love with letterpress — the practice of pressing letters into fiber until our desire to communicate is so palpable that we can’t help but embody the message - and mean it.

I’m deeply moved and influenced lately by poets such Pablo Neruda, Roberto Juarroz, Claribel Alegria, Octavio Paz, and Homero Aridjis, as well as contemporary American poets such as Sharon Olds, William Stafford, Diane Seuss, Mark Strand, and John Duvernoy. Harryette Mullen sent me running toward Oulipo, Dadaists, and a long, buried history of writing with constraints. I couldn’t really live without knowing the work of Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and of course, Walt Whitman, whose lines that last the length of a breath equal infinite love for life.

Educational Philosophy

Telling stories is a matter of survival. To know them, speak them, and share them is bound up not only in what it means to be human now, but in imagined possibilities for our collective future. Writing is a political, spiritual, and social act - made powerful by the decision to exchange, construct, & transform our perceptions of a shared world. Through poetry we root ourselves to the earth and that which spins us out into the outer realms of reality. Poetry is that communal space where people meet to map meaning in a world that otherwise feels chaotic. Through poetry we learn that feeling is a kind of knowledge, and that knowledge lives inside  experience.

My ideas about teaching and learning are rooted in Maxine Green’s notions of wide-awakeness, Paolo Freire’s notion of “radical love” at the center of all teaching and learning relationships, and Steve Seidel’s idea that wondering is “not unlike prayer.” How did I become a teacher? I remember easily falling in love with strangers as if I knew them. Now I know that I was just preparing for my life as an educator. I imagine curriculum as complicated conversation. I design site-specific, original curricula with students and teachers that push our collective thinking on the questions of our time. Poetry is the living, breathing record of experience, exalting personal voice that lives inside the universal, and the universal that lives inside the personal. I am a better teacher because I write. I am a better writer because I teach. Both hold the generative tensions necessary to galvanize movement toward a more human, more loving world.

Links

www.breakarts.org