MAGDA SIEKERT is a writer, scholar, and educator whose career spans continents and disciplines. Before joining Dickinson College in 2009, she served for over two decades as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State, with diplomatic postings across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Her work in public diplomacy informs much of her thinking on language, displacement, and cultural memory.
Trained in Arabic Studies at Georgetown University, where she completed her doctoral degree, and in English language pedagogy at the American University in Cairo, Siekert has taught at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and AUC. Her research interests center on Arabic literature and cinema, language and identity, and the ethics of cultural translation. The poems published here mark a more intimate gesture in her work, one that bridges personal experience with global histories of movement, grief, and resilience.
Editor’s Introduction
On Tender Resistance and the Echo of Presence
In these four poems, Magda Siekert moves with grace through textures of fear, inheritance, displacement, and affection. There is restraint here, but not silence. From the shimmer of freed chickpeas to the haunted steps of a speaker tiptoeing through her own doubts, each poem charts a journey of emergence.
Her work honors the domestic as a site of quiet rebellion, the self as a borderless space, and language as both balm and blade. Whether invoking a grandmother’s hands or Homer and Angelou, the voice is unwavering: gentle, watchful, and clear-eyed.
These are not declarations. They are invitations: to feel, to remember, to continue.
