John Linstrom

Background

About John Linstrom

I am a creative, intellectual worker and learner, passionate about community organizations, public engagement, and education. I write with accuracy, enthusiasm, and tact, I work well under deadlines, and I am a confident public speaker. Whether inside or outside of the academy, I seek to support and promote organizations that utilize cultural heritage to better their communities and leverage the academy's resources for the public good. I have pursued these goals through museum education, curation, administration, and research at the Climate Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, and in editorial work with Cornell University Press. I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. As a creative and scholarly writer, I seek the places where the lyric intersects with the world. My debut poetry collection is To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence, 2024), and my poetry appears widely in journals. My nonfiction manuscript, Demolish the Fence, blends literary theory, historical research, and intellectual memoir to explore the complexities of ecological and social engagement through lenses of race, power, and place. My scholarship on L. H. Bailey appears in The Sower and the Seer (Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021) and soon in PMLA. I am series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press and have edited three volumes of Liberty Hyde Bailey's writings. I am a passionate educator. I believe strongly with Bailey that "the power that moves the world is the power of the teacher," and I feel humbled by that calling. I taught K-12 classes for the Frederick A. O. Schwartz Education Center at the Museum of the City of New York; coursework in environmental literature, introductory literary studies, critical theory, and fiction and nonfiction writing at New York U and Centenary College; nine sections of multimodal and place-based composition courses at Iowa State U (ISU); and a graduate-level course on research and writing at Valparaiso U. I have TA experience in creative writing, literature survey courses, and NYU's Freshman Core program. My approach to college-level teaching emphasizes discussion and collaboration, and I pioneered several community-engaged projects with my place-based composition courses at ISU. I have also taught creative nonfiction to senior citizens at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, nature-study to children aged 6-11 at the Bailey Museum, and poetry writing to Girl Scouts as a writer-in-residence at the Comstock Adventure Center.