Bio

Alysia has dedicated her life to studying words in their spiritual, social, linguistic and creative capacities. Renowned internationally as a spoken word artist, Alysia has had a professional career as a performance artist and speaker since 2010, amassing over nine million views on YouTube. The author of the prize-winning chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars (2016)  received her MFA in poetry from New York University in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019. Her dissertation focused on the discourse-oriented uses of the preverbal particles ‘be’ and ‘done’ in African-American English and developed a novel compositional analysis of their meaning and distribution. As an art journalist and the founding Arts and Soul Editor for Scalawag Magazine, Alysia has supported artists and writers elucidating spiritual and political matters through their creative practices. 

Alysia has written, performed, and taught workshops in twelve countries for organizations including but not limited to: U.S. Mission to Ukraine, U.S. Mission to South Africa, U.S. Mission to Jordan, NAACP,  Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Virginia Theological Seminary, City Seminary New York, The Disrespected Literatures Conference,  Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education, University of Birmingham, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, MoMA: PS1, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Nasher Sculpture Center, The Big Quiet, Button Poetry, and many schools and universities. She is currently working with members of a Texas community to restore a 108-year-old former CME church in Texas and transform it into an intergenerational space for community storytelling. Through this work she hopes to preserve Black places and celebrate Black stories in the U.S. South.