Within Flesh – authored by Al Salehi and Ivy Schweitzer, is a collection, featuring three distinct voices in conversation, offers readers an experience of protest, engagement, and sympathy evoked by the Civil War yet set against the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement of 2020
Houston, Texas
New poetry book ‘Within Flesh’, in dialogue about #BLM (Black Lives Matter) and other contemporary social upheavals, is to be released during Black History Month, in dialogue with literary icon Emily Dickinson. Foreword by Faleeha Hassan, author of the bestselling memoir War and Me.
To be released during Black History Month (Feb 1 – Mar 1, 2024), this collection, featuring three distinct voices in conversation, offers readers an experience of protest, engagement, and sympathy evoked by the Civil War yet set against the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Al Salehi is a Persian-American poet and entrepreneur whose parents immigrated from the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Ivy Schweitzer is a writer and scholar from a Brooklyn Jewish family. Salehi and Schweitzer use Emily Dickinson’s incomparable poems written during the mid-nineteenth century as entry points for their own meditations on still-pressing issues of color, fairness, the police and courts, even the 45th president, and how together we can imagine a different, more equitable world. Though a cloud of darkness pervades Within Flesh, it also contains glimmers of hope and resilience through humor and satire—showing that poetry can transcend time and borders, sparking healing conversations across cultures and generations.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Born in Southern California, Al Salehi is a multilingual American poet of Persian descent who lives in Orange County with a background in technology. Al graduated from UCLA and went on to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Al is a graduate from Dartmouth College’s Guarini Graduate School where he studied Creative Writing, and currently serves on the Alumni Council. He also completed a creative writing program at the University of Oxford, Exeter College. Al’s short film “Love, Basketball” won second place in the My Hero International Film Festival, 2021, under the “Poetry” category. He has published and/or presented poetry in the Society of Classical Poets, The Dartmouth Writers Society, The United Nations Association, Southwest Airlines, O.C. Registrar, Dartmouth Leslie Center Lifeline’s Poetry Share, Houston Library Poetry Share, Clamantis Journal, and the Dartmouth Medical School Lifeline’s Journal. Al’s collection, “Enter Atlas,” was a Semi-Finalist for the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by Natasha Trethewey. Al also plays the electric violin and enjoys making people laugh. Al’s poetry page can be viewed at PoetryByAlan.com.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in a Jewish-American family, Ivy Schweitzer has lived in Vermont for many years and taught courses in American Literature and Women and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She has recently published poetry in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Antiphon volume 19, Clear Poetry, Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. In 2018, she felt called by Emily Dickinson to spend a year immersed in that poet’s most creative period in which she wrote almost a poem a day; the result is a year-long weekly blog called White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862. (PR)
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