Mission Statement

The Black Lives Matter Poetry Alliance (BLMPA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to financially supporting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students in their pursuit of an MFA degree in poetry. The numbers are stark: 75% of MFA students self-reported as being white in 2017. Academia in general remains an exclusionary place, especially for BIPOC. The BLMPA seeks to address, as much as possible, these exclusionary practices by providing inroads for BIPOC students who wish to earn an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College. 

Every year, ¾ of BIPOC students accepted to the program do not attend Brooklyn College because of financial concerns due to a lack of funding for the MFA program. The BLMPA is committed to addressing this issue by fundraising to provide scholarships to incoming BIPOC students pursuing a Poetry MFA at Brooklyn College. 

We are committed to the idea that an education is a right, not a privilege, and that those who wish to attend an MFA program should be able to. 

By raising money to create an unprecedented BLMPA Endowment at Brooklyn College, we are also fighting the toxic culture of austerity that is a direct byproduct of the systemic racism which is unacceptably prevalent in our institutions and ultimately harms many sectors of society outside of Academia’s privileged bubble. With your help, we will change this. 

When we demonstrate that it is possible to fundraise for the BLMPA Endowment at Brooklyn College to provide scholarships for BIPOC poets, we will simultaneously highlight the flawed rationale of imposed austerity and the insidious nature of systemic racism. This in turn will pave the way for change beyond Brooklyn College’s Poetry MFA and ideally serve as a model for other programs negatively affected by imposed austerity fueled by systemic racism. 

Together, we will build a future that we can be proud of. However, without your support this would be impossible to accomplish. Your belief in our cause means the world not only to us, but also to countless others who will, as bell hooks so eloquently stated, engage in “education as the practice of freedom” and “collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.”