American Magpie:
Life and Liberal Arts
American Magpie: Life and Liberal Arts
American Magpie: Life and Liberal Arts is a much-needed defense of a “good education” by a writer who has spent his entire life defending the humanities from its critics, and advocating a broad-based education for students of every age and background. In this book, John Tessitore is not concerned with the structures of higher education, or the desires of business, but with the needs of individual people as they evolve and grow over time—in knowledge, wisdom,
and self-discovery.
Drawing on a diversity of sources—from Dostoevsky to The Beatles, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Chuck D, from Walt Whitman to Eihei Dōgen—he describes an education that prepares us for a lifetime of chance and change, for the pursuit of every curiosity, and for the inevitable epiphanies that visit us. Most importantly, he champions the disciplines that help us fulfill our duty to understand each other and communicate across our differences.
Part manifesto, part cultural criticism, part philosophy, part theory, part memoir, part literary document, American Magpie is an unapologetic defense of humanism for a rapidly-dehumanizing world.
John Tessitore’s Podcast: Be True
In each episode of Be True: Life in Literature, John reads and discusses the writing he loves, and sometimes his own, inviting listeners to live more fully with and through literature..
Available on Substack, Apple Podcasts YouTube and Spotify.
Also Pandora and Stitcher.
About
John Tessitore grew up on Long Island and is a long-time resident of Massachusetts. He has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, a biographer, a teacher, and has directed national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. He is the executive director of a national language education association and runs his own strategic communications business. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. His chapbooks, I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram (2021), We Are Becoming Unbound (2022), All the Lonely American Roads (2022), Parchment: A Prayer Quintet (2022), Body Songs (2023), For a minute there, it seemed like something was happening (2023), Sometimes I Still Pray (2023), My City of Yesterday (2023), Self-Expression After the Revolution (2024), The Dark Ways Mysterious (2024), Terminal D (2024), Apocrypha (2025), Offering (2025), his longer collection The Americans (2023), and his novellas Jigsaw Men (2023) and They Brother’s Blood (2026) are available in print and for Kindle. His poetry podcast, Be True, is available on all major podcast platforms.
Thy Brother’s Blood: A Novella
Thy Brother’s Blood is a tall tale told through the intersecting stories of a corrupt land surveyor named William Very, who discovers a dead body during a walk in the woods, and John David Chapman, an environmental activist engaged in a last-ditch effort to salvage his lonely life and collapsing career. Over the course of a single, seemingly-normal day in New England, their haunted destinies are revealed.
Informed by Gothic mysteries, Biblical allegories, and American mythologies,
Thy Brother’s Blood is a parable of power, guilt, and retribution.
From Eyes Stricken is a long poem–part poetic treatise, part political manifesto, part personal statement, part literary dialogue–written in response to this embattled American moment. It is intended as a call-to-action. Download the pdf. now. All proceeds will be donated to the American Library Association campaign against censorship, Unite Against Book Bans.
Recent poems appearing elsewhere:
“Smoke from Canada” in Issue 3 of Reverie
“I Hear You” in Dogwood Alchemy, Issue 2
“Secatogue” and “Salvador Mundi” in The Paradox, 6/8/25
“Testimony” in Canary Number 69, Spring 2025
“Hospital Time” in The Marrow Issue 4
“International Relations” in Rawhead, Issue 1
and “An Evening with M. Poe” in the special issue Bloody Bones
“No Sudden Movements” in Wild Roof Issue 27
All the lonely American roads
no longer matter to me.
I have outlived the necessity
of my faith, once abiding,
in the long, straight drive
of easy discoveries…
Heel: A Life
Free Download
A modern folk tale. A celebrity tell-all.
A story of villainy. A life told in reverse.
Heel is a poem about someone you may know, but never like this…
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