Current bio:
Onur Ayaz is a poet, scholar and doctoral candidate in the CUNY Graduate Center’s English program. His interests include magazine culture, 20th and 21st century American literature, and the intersection of poetics and pedagogy. His dissertation focuses on the pedagogical insights he has accumulated through teaching poet Charles Olson at CUNY [Q-KNEE]. Since 2022 he has been a writing fellow at LaGuardia Community College’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. Onur has also been awarded a fellowship through the library of congress, to study the work of poet-pedagogue James Emanuel this upcoming summer. His work as a teacher roots itself in the ethos of Black Mountain College, which seeks to center the arts in the liberal arts curriculum. Onur’s commitment to poetry and book culture stems from his own desire in cultivating friendship, community, and care with people and the world around us.
former bio:
I am an educator and doctoral candidate, as well as an avid free writer—I oversee my classroom with a view towards cultivating an environment that promotes both teaching and learning in a friendly, safe, and inviting manner. The reading and writing I conduct as a researcher enriches my pedagogy. When teaching composition, literature, or poetry I emphasize the need to write not only for others but for oneself. Freewriting provides us with a space to write for ourselves without the fear of evaluation. Freewriting’s core to my pedagogy. I am driven by two passions: to learn, and to teach. Though I teach English, I see it as my responsibility to continue to learn and to continue to teach others so that we might, together, bring about meaningful, long-term change. In another frame, I currently study the distribution of American poetics within the 20th century, new American poets and writers such as Charles Olson and Paul Metcalf, and the production of space and nature in literature and culture.
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