Geoffrey Jacques

Geoffrey is a poet, essayist, editor, and critic whose essays on literature, the visual arts, and other subjects have appeared in the Killens Review of Arts and Letters, ArtForum, American Literature, Cineaste, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, and elsewhere. His research explores poetics, modernist literature, African Americans and the visual arts, and the nuts and bolts of creativity. His own poetry has appeared, most recently, in Ping-Pong and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. His books include a literary-critical study, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, and Just For a Thrill, a book of poems. Jacques has taught writing, English, American Literature, African American Literature, and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, York College, CUNY, John Jay College, CUNY, and in the Liberal Studies program at New York University. “Some people make a distinction between aesthetic pleasure, leisure, and work,” says Jacques. “I am interested in how we each can make a life that fuses these interests together. I grew up admiring the way musicians, painters, and poets lived their lives as a fusion of work, creation, and play. My interest in the creative process has not just been limited to writing criticism and the problems involved in writing poetry. I’ve also learned a great deal from studying and thinking about what creative people can teach us about how to live our lives. The Creative Influence Across the Humanities course at Pacifica is a place where we’ll be able to bring together and explore with others an integrated approach to understanding the relationships between the arts, aesthetics, and other aspects of the creative life.” Course participants, he adds, “will explore how artists and other creative people use influence as an interactive instructional process that helps them achieve that synthesis we call the creative act.”