Ailish Hopper

Ailish Hopper is a poet and multidisciplinary artist. The author of two books of poetry and numerous essays, she’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Maryland State Arts Council, and Yaddo, and her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Poetry, and many other places. Her collaborations, the subject of one of her next books, explore self-determination, transformative repair, and non-extractive community-building, especially along racial lines. Essays in that book use a post-conflict approach to imagine rebuilding after white supremacism. At Goucher she teaches classes on nonviolence and transformative justice, social practice, poetry, and new narrative practices. She’s also taught at UMBC in the graduate program in visual art. Her interest in self-determination and transformative community extend to her teaching, where she tries to support students to explore their agency, realize their unique capabilities, and imagine and speak new possibilities. In all her roles she tries to honor the tradition that Paolo Freire described: “trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”