Poetry Brings Us Together: Emergency Rent Assistance Fundraiser
By Jizelle Villegas ’26
On February 15th, two members of our faculty, Professors Sarah Ghazal Ali and Michael Prior, participated in a Zoom reading for a great cause: West Side Rent Assistance. This rent assistance will help renters in the West Side who have been affected by the recent ICE activity in the Twin Cities.
Sarah Green, assistant professor of English at St. Cloud University, hosted the reading. Green also visited Michael Prior’s Fall ’25 Capstone class to talk about her poetry collection, The Deletions. Fellow Twin Cities poets read their own work during the event, like Claire Wahmanholm, who wrote Meltwater: Poems and was a guest at one of our Coffee Houses a few years ago, and Kathryn Nuernberger, a professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
Prof. Ali was the first to read, starting off with June Jordan’s “On a New Year’s Eve.” About Jordan’s piece, she said, “It’s a poem that I have found myself turning to almost daily. I feel like this is a time where everyone is overwhelmed, everything is unpredictable and uncertain, and I think that there’s some really great reminders in the poem that you can just really hold on to.”
After she grounded us in Jordan’s work, she shared a new poem that is not in her acclaimed collection, Theophanies, which was in conversation with June Jordan’s poem “Moving toward Home.” Prof. Ali’s poem is titled “Surveillance,” and it is about how our phones work as “pocket panopticons” that watch us, especially during times like this. It was a very thought-provoking poem — the speaker realizes how our phone cameras are aimed at us, even if we aren’t using them and that we collect pictures that we don’t look at frequently. It was heavy, yet necessary to hear in times like these.
Prof. Prior read two new poems that will be in his upcoming poetry collection, which is coming out next year! We will have something to look forward to from Prof. Prior in some time. He prefaced that his new poetry meditates on the incarceration of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans during the Second World War and how his maternal grandparents experienced that incarceration. He felt that there are historical parallels between that point in history and now. His first poem that he read was “Four-Leaf Clover,” which was about his grandmother and her maternal language. He became inspired to write this after his grandmother passed away. In her will, she left him with her photo album, and he wondered why. There were so many memories of hers in there, but then he saw a pressed four-leaf clover, and it made Prof. Prior remember his childhood with her, and the things she would say in Japanese, like “she” which means four, death and poetry. The second poem he read for us was titled “Snowfall,” which was about dreams. He said that he kept a dream journal for some time, and he shared his dreams with colleagues and friends once he got the job at Macalester. “I realized that’s a great way to distance people and create discomfort. So, I no longer do that,” he said and laughed. In the poem, he dreams of his grandmother and her language, and the cold and snow that winter brings.
The other poets, Sarah, Claire, and Katherine, shared poems about feeling isolated, wanting to stay close to loved ones, and a poem that was written right now during the ICE occupation, which was heavy on Katherine, who read it to us and became emotional.
The vulnerability and strength that these poets had to showcase their poetry in such dire times, and for a great cause, doesn’t go unnoticed. Macalester faculty and parents of Mac students stated they were in the audience and were appreciative of these ongoing efforts. Our English and Creative Writing faculty know how to show up for people who need it and the poets’ poetry was an hour full of insight, community and space to grieve and come together through art and goodwill.
