About the Author

Alysia Nicole Harris is an internationally-known performance artist and poet hailing from Alexandria, Virginia. She is a Cave Canem fellow, founding member of the performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row, and co-founder of the start-up Artist Inn Detroit. Alysia has toured nationally and internationally in Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, and the UK and has spoken at the United Nations. She performs her poems with an eye towards healing and sees her work as promoting transparency, a guilt-free spirituality, women's empowerment and racial reconciliation. Two time Pushcart nominee, and two-time winner of the 2015 and 2014 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, Alysia's poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Vinyl, and Best New Poets 2015. Her work has been anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2015, she was also selected as the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. Alysia completed her MFA in poetry at NYU and her PhD in linguistics at Yale University. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she participates in various organizations dedicated to the revitalization of the literary arts in the South.

Reviews

How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars To Stars by Alysia Nicole Harris intermingles a lushness of texture with a well-defined sagacity of form, and a compelling honesty in these perfectly-crafted poems: "I cannot go / to sleep in my heart. I wet everything & let / parts of me disappear in the drain." The images will lead you to passages of brilliance. Leah Maines Publisher, Finishing Line Press A wild glory suffuses the poetry of Alysia Harris. Here, the body is not villainous nor detached from the imbedded songs of wonder, justice, and history. Here are lines, as if built from Brecht's gestic principle, that wake us from the Big Sleep, that caution us from looking askance at our inexorable beauty. Poem after poem she demonstrates an instinctive glamour in speech that is artful, humane, and profoundly alive. Major Jackson Author of Holding Company