[Image description: Amal, a brown skinned person, looking at the camera with their head resting on their hand. Background image: a blue, white and red dupatta billowing in the wind on a sandy beach]

the world is full of courage, when you write to me (After Agha Shahid Ali: "the world is full of paper, write to me")

Amal Ishaque is a Pushcart nominated poet, multidisciplinary artist and award winning educator living on unceded Musqueam territories. Their writing has been published widely and featured online on platforms such as Split This Rock and The Feminist Wire and in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada and internationally. Amal has received poetry fellowships from VONA - Voices of Our Nation and the Banff Centre and support from the BC Arts Council, ArtStarts and others. They have shared their work on numerous stages.

Amal is also an arts organizer with a long history of a community embedded practice.

Amongst other creative projects, they co-founded Breaking the Fast, an annual, inter-disciplinary arts showcase that ran for several years, featuring gender marginalized and queer Muslim artists.

Amal co-created Tomorrow Is Ours, one of the first creative writing workshop series on BIPOC futurisms in the city. They developed and facilitated the annual program for Telling It Bent, a drop in writing series for queer and trans youth in collaboration with frank theatre. They were also a long-term teaching artist with Reframing Relations, a program of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver. Reframing Relations pairs Indigenous and settler artists together to facilitate arts based workshops on decolonization and reconciliation in schools, community centres and other spaces.

In 2019, they completed a collaborative year-long, multi-disciplinary arts residency with Carnegie Community Centre. Amongst other things, they co-wrote and directed a collaborative play about gentrification and decolonial futures with DTES community members for the Heart of the City Festival. The play received a standing ovation with many requests to mount it again in the future.

Amal is completing a three year arts residency with Changing the Conversation, a project focused on shifting the narrative on housing insecurity. Project partners include Douglas College, Arts Council of New Westminster, the City of New Westminster, Massey Theatre and others.

They are also currently collaborating on an arts residency with the City of Surrey and artist Erv Newcombe focused on bringing to light hidden histories through the archives and community engagement.

Amal’s art practice is grounded in a long cultural tradition of artists as catalysts for social change and liberation.

[Image description of photo below: Amal at a pulpit in a church sharing poetry and speaking about the Muslim ban]