Jill Stoner is Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, former chair of Berkeley’s Master of Architecture program and current Associate Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate Division. Her research and teaching focuses on two themes: global issues of space as an instrument of control and freedom, and the untapped potential of vacant space in the post-recession American landscape. She finds evidence of the first — architecture’s power to limit and to liberate — in contemporary fiction and poetry, and her first book, Poems for Architects, traces the spatial politics of the 20th century through an anthology of modern poems. The two themes come together in her more recent book, Toward a Minor Architecture (MIT Press, 2012). Her former firm Stoner Meek Architecture and Urban Design won numerous national and international awards for both built in the public realm and visionary projects on urban futures. Stoner contributes regularly to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s various publications, and is currently at work on a new book.