About
Alisha Kaplan is a poet who splits her time between downtown Toronto and Bela Farm in Hillsburgh, Ontario.
In the city, she facilitates creative writing workshops with the Toronto Writers Collective, studies in Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program, and teaches people in healthcare how poetry can help to improve quality of care. On the farm, Alisha grows garlic and flowers, harvests honey and wild plant medicine, and hosts barn dances.
For a decade Alisha lived in New York, during which she earned a BA at Barnard College and an MFA in Poetry at New York University, where she also taught creative writing. She was an editor at Narrative Magazine and Washington Square Review, as well as a jazz radio DJ at WKCR, photographer of rare books at Chartwell Booksellers, and intern at PEN America and Sterling Lord Literistic.
Honours she has received include the Hippocrates Prize in Poetry and Medicine, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, a Lenore Marshall Barnard Poetry Prize, and grants from the Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council. Alisha is also a winner of the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition and the Eden Mills Writers Festival Literary Contest, as well as a finalist in Quattro’s 2018 Best New Poet in Canada Contest.
Alisha has performed at the Ace Hotel in New York, Harvard Medical School, Waterstock, the New York City Poetry Festival, the Eden Mills Writers Festival, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Kiever Synagogue, and elsewhere. She enjoys collaborating with musicians and artists of all kinds.