Amal Kassir

Amal Kassir is a Syrian American international spoken word poet who started as a waitress at her family's restaurant in Denver, CO. She has performed in 12 countries, and over five dozen cities. She has lectured, performed poetry and taught workshops in venues ranging from orphanages to refugee camps to youth prisons to universities to community centers to churches to city sidewalks. Her work is heavily influenced by the war in Syria, her experience as a minority in the United States, and the plight of the oppressed all over the world.

She designed her own undergraduate major, titled Community Programming in Social Psychology, where she has been able to create programs for a range of causes and communities, from businesses threatened by gentrification to poetry workshops for refugee students to counter terrorism websites for the Department of Homeland Security. She envisions a world of accessibility and literacy for all, and all her efforts work towards this vision. She is working on her first book, Scud Missile Blues, due for publishing by the end of this year, Inshaallah.