Alise Alousi

Alise Alousi is an Iraqi American poet living in Detroit and is also director of Alternatives for Girls, a local program to keep young women from dropping out of school. She was born in 1965. Her mother is from Detroit, Michigan and her father is from Baghdad, Iraq. She attended school at Wayne State University and studied creative writing and literature. Born to an Iraqi father, Alousi still has relatives in Iraq.

As an Arab American poet, Alousi is also associate director of InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a creative writing program serving Detroit's youth. Her work has recently appeared in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry and will appear in Mutanabbi Street Starts Here late in 2009. She also has contributed to We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War published in 2012. She received a grant from the Knight Foundation in 2015 for her work pairing recent Iraqi women refugees with artists and writers in order to share their stories through photography and essay.

She is a member of Women in Black in Detroit and serves on the board of Radius of Arab American Writers.