Episode 13: Ali Black - “The Black Experience from a Cleveland Lens”

In this ep we got to sit down with Ali Black, who inspires us (and many people) as a poet, writer, educator, and administrator from Cleveland. We talk to Ali about her new writing program for youth, “The Most Promising,” her 25 years of nonprofit work, taking young people seriously, the craft of organization, the role of honesty in collaboration, specifying community, the relationship between poetry and social media, and her deep love of Cleveland. Ali shares some great news about co-founding a new organization, reflects on her longtime collaboration with artist Donald Black, Jr., and talks about using her work to bring attention to her city. Along the way we also talk about reimagining the city on bikes in a poetry ride out, Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, Russell Atkins’s World’d Too Much, China Miéville’s The City & The City, and Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. 

Find Ali’s poetry collection If It Heals At All from Jacar Press here! And you’ll want to read her essays “Queen of All Spaces” and “Lessons Learned.”