Ailish Hopper

Ailish Hopper (born Washington DC) is an American poet and teacher.
Hopper has published a chapbook called Bird in the Head (2005); she has also published a poetry collection called Dark~Sky Society (2014), which explores racial tensions. In an interview with WYPR, she has noted her interest in race relations as being a consequence of her coming of age in DC and of her Irish heritage. Hopper's poetry has also been included in Agni, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Harvard Review Online, Tidal Basin Review, among others. In addition to page poetry, she has performed with the band Heroes are Gang Leaders, along with poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Randall Horton, and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. Hopper has also written essays about race relations, including one in Boston Review, "Can a Poem Listen? Variations on Being-white."
Hopper graduated from Princeton University with a BA in religion and a certificate in African-American studies, and graduated from Bennington College with an MFA in creative writing and literature. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio, and Yaddo. She currently is an assistant professor in Goucher College's peace studies department.

2013 Maryland State Individual Artist grant

2013 New Issues Poetry prize runner-up

2005 Center for Book Arts prize

"Did it Ever Occur to You that Maybe You're Falling in Love" Poetry magazine, January 2016

Dark~Sky Society (New Issues, 2014)

"The Good Caucasian" Harvard Review Online, August 2014

"Dream, Technidifficult" Academy of American Poets

"Circle in the Grass" Blackbird, Spring 2014

Bird in the Head (Center for Book Arts, 2005)

Jane Hirshfield:

"Hopper attends to an examination of her own place in this American landscape of intimate and indelible participation...and offers to say what the less courageous or less moved leave unsaid."

Greg Tate:

"“[T]he taut economy of Ailish Hopper’s syntax befits a chronicler bent on this government town’s nightly collapse of the personal and sociopolitical….Hopper’s poems dance on this divided skein with sculpted and oblique turns of phrase — lyrical arabesques constructed in terse verbal defiance….Consider her verse coiled and sprung; and, to paraphrase an exalted homegrown colloquialism, ‘busted loose’.”

Douglas Kearney:

"...these unsettling poems trace Hopper’s struggle to make sense of terrible legacies, from racial violence in the name of white female bodies to a father’s terminal illness as a site of private and public histories. Hopper’s lines halt, knot, interdigitate, and stutter, but they never flinch. She leaves that to the reader. What she doesn’t offer us are easy epiphanies, a bid for being a good caucasian, or post-race snake oil. This is difficult work for a time when ‘any touch/will bruise’. Dark~Sky Society insists we reach and be reached anyway.”