Hey there.
Here’s the very short version: I’m a writer, PhD candidate, and university teacher based in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Here’s the relatively short version: I’m a writer and PhD candidate based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Originally from Fairfield County, Connecticut, I hold a BA, MA, and MFA from Columbia University and currently teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the English department at the University of Iceland. My doctoral research is on literature and culture after 9/11. My creative writing has been published in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Ós Pressan, Storychord, and other outlets. I’m an aspiring novelist.
Here’s the much too long version: I’m Margrét Ann, a.k.a M.A., and I’m a writer, editor, translator (Icelandic to English), and university teacher. I split my time between Reykjavík and Connecticut.
I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut and spent my childhood summers camping in the Icelandic countryside and playing soccer in the delirious midnight sun. When I was in elementary school, I wrote on a piece of construction paper that my favorite subjects were English and Art, so I like to think I’m doing my younger self proud now. After a rough fifth grade year of being bullied, my parents suggested I switch to a religious middle school. There, I learned in painstaking detail the gamut of English grammar rules from a nun named Sister Anne. In high school, my AP English teacher, Dr. Saul Dicker, read aloud, anonymously, an essay that a student had written in class about Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. He read every line, stopping sometimes to comment on what fine words the student had chosen — “the cat skulked away” comes to mind. “One of your classmates is a very talented writer,” he said to the class. I turned tomato-red. When his eyes met mine, he winked.
In 2010 I graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University with a B.A. in Philosophy. I credit Dr. Kenneth Seeskin with my decision to major in this field. My senior thesis — about Plato’s ontological dualism and its epistemological consequences (which, by the way, my mom gave up reading at the title page) — won the William Pepperell Montague Prize for Best Senior Thesis in Philosophy. My advisor was Dr. Wolfgang Mann at Columbia. Awesome name, yes.
The following year, I returned to Morningside Heights as a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University. There, I studied Higher and Post-Secondary Education and learned the ins and outs of college-level teaching and learning, the professoriate, student affairs, and the social, political, and economic factors that intersect with post-secondary education under fabulous professors like Dr. Anna Neumann and Dr. Monica Christensen. I earned an M.A. in 2011.
After working for several years as an educational consultant at a company in Greenwich, CT, I returned to Columbia for a third time — now as a Creative Writing student in the School of the Arts. Those years of reading, writing, talking about reading, talking about writing, and befriending other obsessive reader-writers were, I think, the best time of my life. I rented a room from an elderly Chinese couple in a swank Upper West Side doorman building, and sometimes they would leave warm purple sweet potatoes wrapped in tinfoil outside my door. I began as a nonfiction student but grew tired of writing about myself and later defected to fiction. I am especially grateful to professors Binnie Kirshenbaum, Victor LaValle, Margo Jefferson, Patty O’Toole, and Bill Wadsworth. While in the program, I was awarded a McCrindle Foundation Fellowship, selected as an Emerging Writer for the World Writers’ Festival in Paris, France, and nominated for the Henfield Prize for best Fiction writer. I earned my M.F.A. in 2016.
I then moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I taught education courses about the intersection of schools and society, and researched teaching and learning in a mega-church. I’m very grateful to have learned from Dr. Dan Liston, Dr. Elias Sacks, and Dr. Susan Jurow at CU-Boulder.
Since 2017, I’ve lived primarily in Iceland, where winters are dayless, summers are nightless, and sheep outnumber people four to one. In America I felt very Icelandic, and in Iceland I feel very American. I think my true home must be a halfway point in the middle of the North Atlantic.
I studied Literature, Culture, and Media at the University of Iceland, and my Masters thesis analyzed the films Adaptation, Birdman, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? through the lens of adaptation theory. My advisor was the ever-gracious Dr. Guðrún Björk Guðsteinsdóttir. In 2021, I received a doctoral grant from the University of Iceland to research literature after 9/11 — focusing on novels that aren’t about the events of September 11, 2001, but that illuminate what it means to live in a post-9/11 world.
I currently teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the English department at the University of Iceland. My classes include Literature and Essay Writing, Speaking and Listening, Theory and Writing, Public Speaking and the Art of Persuasion, Literature after 9/11, and Creative Nonfiction. I also teach a semester-long module in the United Nations University Gender Equality Studies & Training Programme (GEST).
I’ve been an artist in residence at Catwalk Artist Residency in Catskill, New York and Gullkistan Artist Residency in Laugarvatn, Iceland. In addition to scholarship funding from Columbia, CU-Boulder, and the University of Iceland, I have received travel grants to Iceland, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. I’ve spent a lot of time in school, but I’ve learned as much, if not more, from my teachers outside of academia — Coby Kozlowski, Lorin Roche, Tracy Bleier, Dani Shapiro, Leslie Jamison.
I have published multiple short stories, personal essays, and academic texts in numerous outlets. I’m currently (yup, still) working on my first novel. More to come soon. In the meantime, I made a list of some of my favorite literature, which might tell you more about me than my bio does.
Most of my days are spent reading, writing, teaching, thinking about writing, walking, exercising, not cooking, and most importantly caring for a tasmanian devil of a toddler, my daughter Thórunn Margrét.