In this LCI Spotlight, I spoke with Jay-Marie Hill: a longtime educator and recently certified League Cycling Instructor whose work lives at the intersection of bikes, creativity, community, and care. A singer-songwriter, musician, cultural organizer, and former elementary school teacher, Jay-Marie brings a rare range of passion and experience to their bicycle instruction.
Based in St. Louis, MO, but hailing from Oakland, CA, their imprint on cycling and movement spaces is felt far and wide. 2026 has seen the start of Jay-Marie’s newest endeavor, offering cycling classes through building Fly By Bike Ride Skool & Culture Club, with a focus on city riding, bikepacking, and equipping Black, trans, and women riders. After starting Black Trans Bike Experience in 2019 — built to share freedoms from lessons learned about group rides and bike touring with Black, trans, queer, and folks community-wide around their adopted home of STL — seven years later, their mission at Fly By Bike RS & CC is both simple and expansive: to make bikes accessible, cities safer, and human bodies more valued in public space.
This conversation we shared comes at a critical time, as Black, trans, and at times queer people of color broadly, live a reality faced with layers of arrested mobility. These communities, Jay-Marie says, are too often gathered only by loss: where rides and rallies are primarily organized in response to violence, and where connection and grief are never far apart. But they also say, because life is fragile, building, riding — and simply being — together becomes both a doubling down of worth, and a celebration: a way to claim space in regions and cities that deserve to be re-built with our bodies, needs, and access in mind.
How did you get into bikes?
It feels like I’ve just always been riding! I grew up in the Bay Area riding with my mom, Feliz, nicknamed Sunny, and biking felt natural and normalized thanks to Berkeley and the Bay Area’s strong bike and public transit infrastructure. Her enthusiasm and positive approach to cycling — treating hills as opportunities rather than obstacles — has really shaped my relationship with the activity. When I moved home after college, she went half with me on my first road bike, an all-white Trek I named Spirit. Although it was stolen while I was teaching at Bay Area Girl’s Rock Camp in 2015, its pink-wheeled Craigslist-replacement (also sadly stolen 😭) inspired my first-ever tattoo in 2020. I see it as a permanent reminder to be grateful for this gift of flight from my mom, and to root myself in my early love of riding.
What was your bike journey after college and how have you woven it in with your culture work?
After college I returned to Oakland, taught fourth grade, and began riding with my mom’s club — the Oakland Yellowjackets — in 2012 before later joining an all-Black-women bikepacking trip in 2015. After a career pivot to youth theater and arts administration, I then spent a few years off the bike but still touring — as an organizer and performing artist helping fuel Movement for Black Lives organizers as we turned from protest to expanding possibility via policy, and shaping the electoral playing field. It was this travel and honest recognition of the status of the right-leaning national landscape that led me to decide to leave CA and re-migrate back toward my dad’s Chicago-roots, landing in South City St. Louis in 2017.
To further deepen my commitment to shifting the national political landscape, I did a short stint at the ACLU as a Statewide Trans Justice Organizer, working to reduce post-Ferguson policing of Black folks and the latest waves targeting trans folks. Out of a craving for community, movement, and the natural world, I simultaneously built an emergent riding & bicycle community through pop-up shops, group rides, mutual aid work, and increasingly ambitious trips — from doing my first 40+ mi race at FoCo Fondo, to a group 60-mile, 48 hour bikepacking trip from Ferguson to Defiance, and joining a 260-mile Major Knox Adventures’ cohort in 2024 — with my mom’s sunny energy continuing to inspire me and my crews along the way.
At this point, both biking and music, to me, are vehicles for possibility and connection, especially coming out of the 2014-2020 protest era, and the introduction of COVID + Long Covid to our world. Through Black Transcendence, BTBE, and now Fly By Bike, I hold space for programs that nurture marginalized communities across body, mind, and spirit, drawing on St. Louis’s rich Black history and sense of rootedness in culture — this soil has seeded and grown global and cultural icons like Josephine Baker, Tina Turner, Smino, Jordan Ward, Miles Davis, Maya Angelou, and so, so many more.
So whether inviting someone on a ride, hosting a somatic healing retreat, or sharing new music like my 2024 Ride For It EP or my latest Tiny Desk, “When You Say”, the underlying drive is the same: toward bringing people together, reconnecting them to their life force and the generational benefits that accountability to Black people & community brings — this assignment of passing forward the freedom, steadiness, and power that our elders and ancestors built for us to have and build on. A reminder that “the people could fly”, if you will.
What was your motivation to become an LCI?
I saw a real gap in St. Louis, where bike education for adults and teens was virtually nonexistent, infrastructure was underdeveloped, and decades of anti-Black divestment has left the region siloed and car-dependent. While I learned to ride from my mom, I recognize that her hard-and-far riding style wasn’t a universal on-ramp for new and even returning riders. When she became a League Cycling Instructor, it opened my eyes to the Bike League and this entire educational and policy-based framework for teaching biking. So, I pursued the certification to make cycling more accessible and to bring those resources to people in my community who had never had them and I hope I can travel around making bikes accessible for every community across the country and world, so we can all more collectively build on the gift of enduring technology that they are.
How do you welcome new people to biking?
With the expectation that they’ll be great at it, and that they will find in their body what feels best for them through the experience. Biking doesn’t always feel good at first — sometimes it’s really uncomfortable — but we can build a space and set a context as cycling educators where new folks are set up for success. Riding a bike is a life-elevating experience, so I always try to do my best to make it welcoming. It might be hard, but it’s worth the discomfort. We have this gift of life, so let’s ride together.
You’re going to be at the National Bike Summit later this year — tell me about what you’re looking forward to.
I’m looking forward to the mobile workshop that I’m leading, and the events we’re coordinating the Saturday in advance. From an 11a Black LCI meetup & Mobility Justice World Cafe to a 1pm Ride Smart, Ride Fly Class in Anacostia Park (weather willing!), we wanted to come in and really connect to community vs. swooping into and not paying our respects to those who call it home and steward it daily. For the mobile workshop to kick off the Summit, I think of it as a Black/Indigenous Land acknowledgement and I hope the whole community feels honored and poured into, just knowing it’s happening but I hope folks can roll! RSVP at bit.ly/flybybike or via the Bike League’s Summit pages.
Ride For It! – FreeDC
“Attendees will begin with a short somatic exercise to help them arrive and ground in their bodies. As visitors to the region, people will also learn about current local DC history and organizing campaigns. After traveling the city between the NMAAHC and Howard University, there will be an increased pride and understanding about the necessity and contribution of these historic investments in the region. Participants will leave with a new clarity about Black organizing, and tools to increase their advocacy for and consider communities not often included in cycling summits. From touring and experiencing Howard, participants will leave having learned more about regional and Black community experiences, and will have gathered tools for expanding their commitment to Black neighbors, current / potential cyclists, advocates, organizers and other leaders both in DC and in their specific home regions.”
What is your favorite thing about being on a bike?
Knowing the curves of a city by bike is a special and grounding experience. I love how you develop the instinct for wayfinding in your body, knowing where you’re going and how to get there. And I appreciate that you’re exposed to our incredible outdoor world and the elements in a way you can’t access in a car. Cars numb your experience with the world. When we ride, we don’t need engines — we are the engines, and it reminds us we can be the engines in other parts of our life as well.
What do you hope to see from the bike movement in the future?
I want to see more people out on their bikes, out in the world. It’s less for me about branding, and identity, although those are crucial to telling a cohesive story, and finding and calling in your intended audiences, but I feel it’s more about refining and using all the tools we have for maintaining community, while we have each other earth-side. Building on this standard of knowing and holding people close, it’s up to us to not let a lack of imagination be why we miss opportunities to organize — I really see bikes as something that gives us the ability to propel ourselves to new goals, taking new routes, but using the same roads our people laid for us. The bike becomes this propelling force, creating spaces for moving our organizing principles forward and fueling these movements. May we keep these worlds open and grow them to be even more accessible, for the well-being of each other, and the human collective.
