Amy Piller

Amy Piller is the Curriculum Director at The Urban Assembly Unison School, a public middle school she helped co-found this September in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Prior to working at UA Unison, Amy taught middle school English and social studies at the Jacob Riis School, a PK-8 public school in lower Manhattan.

She studied literary arts at Brown University (B.A., 2007) and English Education as a New York City Teaching Fellow at Brooklyn College (M.A., 2010). Through professional development around Learning Cultures, she has honed her specialty in middle school literacy. She is now pursuing her degree in leadership in the arts at Bank Street College. She has presented nationally at the annual meetings of the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English and is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University.

Amy writes in her spare time, both about the curriculum reform work of Learning Cultures as she sees it play out in her own classroom, as well as about her own experiences through her poetry, which you can find published recently in Watershed, Atlantic-Pacific Press, Cider Press Review and Bellowing Arc, among others. She has two self-published books of poetry entitled Becoming Morning (2007) and Prescribed Burn (2011). She was also a poet in residence at the Albee Foundation in 2006 and at Ragdale in 2011.

You can read Amy’s posts and comments on the Learning Cultures Forum under the name, “aspiller.”