Red Emma’s

Please join us in welcoming two Baltimore poets and educators as they share their insightful, provocative, and deeply honest writings and poetry. How does the way a poet moves on the page connect with the way they move in the world? How does the interior life of a poet reflect the world in which they live?Abdul Ali's most recent work Trouble Sleeping, explores the literary horizons of community, insomnia, the interior lives of urban speakers. Ali's dedication to the cultivation of young poets and development of their voices has rightfully garnered him great regard. Ailish Hopper will be reading from Dark~Sky Society, which explores the ways that racism and white supremacy, and conflicts of all kinds, get handed down. In our bodies, our families, in neighborhoods, societies. She will also be performing new work, which interlayers our physical, lyrical, and political bodies to look at the pitfalls of belief, and the way that longing and desire emerge from our political bodies as much as they emerge from our physical ones.Abdul Ali was born in Mt. Pleasant, NY but raised in New York City. Ali is a two-time recipient of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities' Literature fellowship. He was a fellow at American University where he received his M.F.A in Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in Gargoyle, A Gathering of Tribes, New Contrast, and the anthology Full Moon on K Street, among other literary journals and magazines. He currently teaches at Towson University and lives in Maryland with his family. Ailish Hopper is the author of DARK~SKY SOCIETY (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2014), selected by David St. John, and the chapbook, Bird in the Head (Center for Book Arts), selected by Jean Valentine. Individual poems have appeared in journals including Agni, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Tidal Basin Review, as well as many others. She has received support from the Maryland State Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and teaches at Goucher College, in Baltimore.''Abdul Ali's Trouble Sleeping awakens the mind. Like the guts of a marvelous timepiece, the incremental details tick with merciless accuracy and timeless certainty. Urban, gutsy, each poem exposes the conflicts of an inner-city speaker. Yet even in the midst of conflict one believes the voice saying, 'I love the city.' Here, popular culture converges with iconic moments of American history; personal and worldly affairs, and a knowing, practiced music holds Trouble Sleeping together as a needful song.'' - --Yusef Komunyakaa''[T]he taut economy of Ailish Hopper's syntax befits a chronicler bent on this government town's nightly collapse of the personal and sociopolitical... Hopper's poems dance on this divided skein with sculpted and oblique turns of phrase lyrical arabesques constructed in terse verbal defiance.... Consider her verse coiled and sprung; and, to paraphrase an exalted homegrown colloquialism, 'busted loose'.'' ---Greg Tate