Harris, Alysia Nicole: - Alysia Nicole Harris is an internationally-known performance artist and poet hailing from Alexandria, Virginia. She is a Cave Canem fellow, founding member of the performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row, and co-founder of the start-up Artist Inn Detroit. Alysia has toured nationally and internationally in Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, and the UK and has spoken at the United Nations. She performs her poems with an eye towards healing and sees her work as promoting transparency, a guilt-free spirituality, women's empowerment and racial reconciliation. Two time Pushcart nominee, and two-time winner of the 2015 and 2014 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, Alysia's poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Vinyl, and Best New Poets 2015. Her work has been anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2015, she was also selected as the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. Alysia completed her MFA in poetry at NYU and her PhD in linguistics at Yale University. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she participates in various organizations dedicated to the revitalization of the literary arts in the South.