Ali Black

Ali Black is a writer and educator. She directs a literacy-based after school and summer program for girls at West Side Community House in Cleveland, Ohio. Ali has been writing and performing poetry for over 15 years. She has taught and performed at Playhouse Square, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center and various schools. She is the co-founder of acerbic, Inc., which is a multi-disciplinary arts collective dedicated to providing a safe and resourceful home to artists of color. She is working on her first collection of poetry and is a current graduate student for poetry at the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. She is also the poetry editor for Gordon Square Review. Her work has appeared in A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City and December Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2016 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize for her poem “Kinsman.”