Alysia Nicole Harris is a phenomenal poet, performance artist and Black girl who flourishes. She graduated from Yale with a PhD in linguistics and she completed her MFA at NYU in poetry so it’s safe to say that she knows what she’s doing and she’s a beast with the pen. She won the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pocataligo Poetry Prize in 2015. She has even performed her work at the United Nations.
I was in the eighth grade when I heard Alysia’s poem “That Girl” for the first time. Our class was doing a poetry unit and ever since then, I was hooked. I re-watched my introduction to her genius over and over again until I eventually started branching out and listening to her other pieces. About a year after I’d heard “That Girl”, she performed a new poem called “This Woman”. This poem is about her growth from a girl writing poetry about a boy who doesn’t care to a woman who knows her own beauty and her own worth.
Everybody can learn something from her and her art, it is a catalyst for self discovery and self awareness.
Her ability to tell a story and do it in a way that she allows everyone who is watching to have their own personal experience is amazing beyond words.
She is one of the founding members of The Strivers Row, a poetry performance collective, and she has performed her own work on the platform multiple times. She has covered an abundance of topics in her poems including racism, one sided relationships, her own ethnic background and immigration. One poem in particular entitled, “Not A Number”, humanizes the victims of human trafficking. She does a wonderful job of not just speaking of the victims simply as statistics and even says herself,
“Tell them … I am not a number I have a story. A story that includes love, and survival is just the beginning”
. Her powerful use of words communicates the multiple layers of certain topics that are not just the surface.
She has recently released a collection of poems entitled “How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars” which you can check out on her website. The collection of 21 poems is a beautiful offering to the world. Her work inspires many, including myself, to keep writing and to keep discovering their true selves. Alysia Nicole Harris is truly the definition of Black Girl Magic.
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