Kemi Alabi’s poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Catapult, Guernica, them, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. As cultural strategy director of Forward Together, they’ve built political power with cultural workers of color through programs like Echoing Ida, a home for Black women and nonbinary writers, and annual art campaigns like Trans Day of Resilience. They co-edited The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press) with Cynthia R. Greenlee and Janna Zinzi. Against Heaven (Graywolf Press), Alabi’s debut collection, reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born. Instead of turning to predetermined salvation, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. It’s a collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing – the highest power there is.
