The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is proud to announce the 2022 National Student Poets Program Alumni Micrograntees! Thanks to the support of The Maurice R. Robinson Fund and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alliance provides grants to five alumni of the National Student Poets Program (NSPP). The NSPP Alumni Microgrant Program supports creative projects by alumni of the National Student Poets Program and is part of our Alumni Microgrant Program. You can read more about the ten 2022 Alumni Micrograntees on our blog.
Judge Glenis Redmond selected NSPP alumni Sojourner Aheebee, Daniel Blokh, Aline Dolinh, Salma Mohammad, and Ariana Smith.
Congratulations to all of our grantees! Read more about their inspiring projects below.
Sojourner Aheebee
2013 National Student Poet
The Last Place They Thought Of | Philadelphia, PA
Sojourner Ahebee archives moments of intimacy between Black women. She writes about the insecurity of historical archives, insecurity of belief, and insecurity as a feeling that connects women to their most powerful desires. A graduate of Stanford University, her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Academy of American Poets (Poem A Day), Muzzle Magazine, NPR, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s podcast Hear to Slay, and elsewhere. A multimedia journalist, she produces audio stories about systemic patient experiences with racism for WHYY News. Sojourner believes not in the boat that floated her here, but in what she’ll do with the water.
With the use of this microgrant, Aheebee will write two poems—contrapuntals—that explore the history of anxiety in Sojourner Truth’s body and her own. This project is a critical step towards completing her collection of poems in response to Sojourner Truth’s visual project. Truth’s separation from her parents as an enslaved child, her sexual assault, and her illiteracy made her a highly vulnerable woman, despite the symbol of strength she’s come to represent. Aheebee’s separation from her birth country as a young child and her father’s premature death have opened up overlapping/divergent wounds of insecurity. As a scholar of African American history and a practicing artist, this project is a kind of proof of concept for her ability to marry her academic interests with artistic expression.
Daniel Blokh
2018 National Student Poet
Where Does Motherland Begin? | Birmingham, AL
Daniel Blokh is a writer of poetry and non-fiction currently studying Comparative Literature and Russian Studies at Yale University. He served as a 2018 National Student Poet and has published two poetry chapbooks and one book of creative nonfiction.
With his microgrant, Blokh will reconstruct the untold Soviet-Jewish war experience in a 5-episode podcast series, showcasing the undervalued contributions of Soviet Jews to the war effort and the post-war Soviet literature. His project is titled after a war song by Mark Bernes, a Soviet singer, actor, heart-throb—and Jew. Much of the Soviet culture responding to WWII was made by Jews, even as Jews themselves were slandered and repressed by Soviet leadership. Beneath many heartfelt films and somber poems about Russia’s national tragedy lies the particular sadness of a people who had confronted its own extinction.
Aline Dolinh
2013 National Student Poet
Juncture | Somerville, MA
Aline Dolinh is a current MFA candidate in poetry at Boston University. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in underblong, The Rumpus, Passages North, and Frontier Poetry among other publications, and her writing on film and music has appeared in Bitch magazine as well as the anthologies “The Best Record Stores in America” and “The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women.”
Inspired by the unbounded possibilities of both intimacy and misperception generated by online life, Dolinh will use her microgrant for a collaborative poetry and art project with Alena Titova (also an alumnus of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Gold Key, Art 2013, 2014) that will take the form of an epistolary “exquisite corpse” in which the two authors respond to each other in turn through their respective mediums.
Salma Mohammad
2019 National Student Poet
Poetry as Self-Preservation: Translating the Work of Hasan Ibn Thabit | Liberty Township, NJ
Salma Mohammad is a Muslim Palestinian-Egyptian American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who pulls from her bilingual and bicultural background to write about the various racial and religious diasporas in America. Poetry has strong roots in the oral culture of Arab history, and Mohammad hopes to revive the creativity and hope of Arabs and Muslims who have endured various forms of linguistic, cultural, and historical erasure.
With her microgrant, Mohammad will translate a collection of works from Hasan Ibn Thabit, a renowned Arabic-Muslim poet at the time of the prophet, into the English language in a comprehensible and synthesized format. This hasn’t been done before. There are little to no translational works of Arabic poetry collections despite the sophistication of historical Arabic poetry. Many texts, especially poetry, have fallen through the language gap between Arabic history and today’s Arab-Americans, and hence English-speaking Arab-Muslims residing in America aren’t aware of the richness of their own history or the importance of poetry in it.
Ariana Smith
2018 National Student Poet
Witness | Las Vegas, NV
Ariana Smith is a student at Howard University where she studies film and African American studies. She is a Director’s Ensemble member of the performing arts organization, the Howard Players. While serving as the 2018 National Student Poet for the West, Ariana developed a community service project that brought poetry workshops to schools in Compton, California. Currently, she utilizes film as her principal artistic medium. As a visual artist, Ariana employs the emotive and stirring potential of the visual image as a bridge where her historical and sociological studies meet her creative ventures.
With her microgrant, Smith will explore the intimate relationship Black people have with death and loss in this film project. After experiencing loss in the year 2021, she felt closer to her spiritual self, and particularly, with those who have lived, loved, and survived for her to be here. Through experimental narrative fiction, Witness will follow three hearing-impaired sisters who wish to uncover the mysterious death of their uncle. As we follow their journey, Witness will encounter the spiritual, religious (and lack thereof) ways in which Black people connect with the other side to make sense of their futures.