Allia Abdullah-Matta is an Associate Professor of English at CUNY LaGuardia Community College. As an educator and writer, she strives to address the power and politics of creative expression and voice as essential instruments of social justice practice and transformation. She was the co-recipient of The City College of New York (CCNY)The Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Poetry (2018). Her poetry has been published in Newtown Literary, Promethean, Marsh Hawk Review, Mom Egg Review Vox, and Global City Review.
Connection to SEQ: Queens is home. Spent my early years borrowing library books from the Rochdale branch. The librarians knew me as that little brown girl, who wore a scarf on her head, and who read all of the books in the children and young adult sections by age nine. A middle-aged Black woman librarian screened my book check-outs, no this is too grown! She had a look that I read as, put it back and find something else. I went to that library at least three times per week. This woman was an early mentor; her sternness a guide to my mind and a guard to what was appropriate for a little brown girl to ingest and remain inquisitive, thirsty for knowledge and words. I attended public school 80 and IS 72 both located within and around Rochdale, visited my grandparents’ houses in St. Albans and the Southside, and went to high school in Forest Hills. I am a Queens girl; she (Queens) was my stomping grounds and the place where I learned to read, play, work, and grow. I fell in love for the first time with a Queens-boy and raised my own boys in Queens many years later. Queens lives in my bloodstream and in my heart—she be the air of my words!
