Teaching

adrienne maree brown asserts that “all organizing is science fiction … we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” Similarly, I believe that teaching can be a form of science fiction. Classrooms offer prefigurative possibilities: they can be humanizing, democratic communities that prepare young people to build a more just society.

I’ve worked with students in grades three through twelve. I currently teach ninth and tenth grade humanities at Meridian Academy in Boston. Previously, I taught at the Mission Hill School and the Acera School, among others. Also, I edit Young Radish, a magazine of poetry and art by kids and teens. Below is some of my writing about education.

On climate justice pedagogies:

  • Imagining Climate Futures: Fifth and Sixth Graders Write Place-Based Speculative Fiction (Rethinking Schools)

  • Where are the Climate Change Superheroes? Systems Thinking and Climate Activism in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest (Zinn Education Project)

  • “Stupid Book of Wrongness”: The Heartland Institute’s Climate Change Denial Book Meets Informed 3rd and 4th Graders (Rethinking Schools)

On teaching literary translation:

Assorted:

  • Grieving a School Year Unlike Any Other (The Boston Globe)

  • How the Rhetoric of “Learning Loss” Is Harming Schools (The Progressive)

    • Discussed by Sarah Jaffe in her article “What Teachers Can Teach Us About Work”

  • Inviting Narrative Back into the Science Classroom: Telling the Stories of the Elements with Graphic Novels (School Science Review)

  • Boston: Past, Present, Future (student project: oral histories, memoirs, and speculative fiction in interactive“story maps” of Greater Boston)

  • Who Cares about Classroom Norms? Human Needs and Community Healing (Rethinking Schools)

Literary Translation

I translate contemporary and 20th century Francophone literature.

Monchoachi

I’m currently working on a collection of Monchoachi’s poetry in translation, supported in part by a grant from the Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique.

Anthologies:

  • “The beautiful dream that we unfold and extend …”: poem by Monchoachi, in dialogue with photos by David Damoison. In Visible: Text + Image, Two Lines, 2022 (available online at Guernica)

  • “Between Crié and Écrit” (essay), accompanied by my afterword, “Monchoachi’s Poetics of Translation” (link). In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis, 2022)

Mireille Jean-Gilles

  • “The School” (Asymptote)

  • “Voracious Street,” “The Missing,” and “In the Unwearied Heart of the Sea.” In Elektrik: Caribbean Writing (Two Lines, 2023)

André du Bouchet

Outside: Poetry and Prose (Bitter Oleander Press, 2020)

This bilingual collection (co-translated with Hoyt Rogers) brings together a cross-section of verse from over five decades of Du Bouchet’s work, including a selection of his legendary notebook fragments.

“Despite the immense importance of André du Bouchet in French letters, he remains an obscure figure to English readers … Fishman and Rogers never stumble as they translate along du Bouchet’s razor-thin semantic edges, boiling language down to its fundamentals: images and space.” -Michael Overstreet, LA Review of Books

Yves Bonnefoy

Poems: