Bio

Alysia Nicole Harris was born in Fremont, California but grew up in Alexandria, VA and considers herself on all accounts a member of the ranks of great Southern women. At age 10 she wrote her first poem, after hearing about sonnets in English class. That class began her life-long love of poetry and the literary arts.

Alysia went to The University of Pennsylvania where she experienced her first success as a writer and a performer. In 2008 she featured on the HBO documentary: Brave New Voices where she wowed audiences with her piece "That Girl". In 2010 Alysia graduated UPENN Summa Cum Laude with honors and was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. 

Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019. Her dissertation “The Non-Aspectual Meaning of African-American English ‘Aspect’ Markers” breaks with traditional analyses and explores the discourse-oriented uses of the preverbal particles ‘be’ and ‘done’ in varieties of African-American English.

Although she has experienced scholastic success, poetry has always come first in her heart. Cave Canem fellow, winner of the 2014 and 2015 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prizes, Pushcart Nominee, her poetry has appeared  in Best American Poets, Indiana Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, Squaw Valley Review, Letters Journal, and Vinyl Magazine among others. Her first chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars won the 2015 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest and is available for purchase on site.

Alysia was also a founding member of the internationally known performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row and has garnered over 5 million views on YouTUBE. She has toured nationally for the last 10 years and also performed at the United Nations and the US Embassies in Jordan and Ukraine, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, the UAE, and the UK.

Alysia now lives in Atlanta, GA where she works as a consultant for the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education and as arts and soul editor at Scalawag Magazine, a nonprofit POC-led, women run media organization focused on Southern movement, community, and dissent. She is working on a book of poems and a collection of essays about the intersections of faith, violence, and the natural world.