Meet our Fellows

Alysia Nicole Harris: Meeting House Revival

Corsicana, Texas

Working at the Intersection of Church and Community-building

“When churches are dying, what happens if we believe in resurrection and revival?” asks Dr. Alysia Nicole Harris. In founding Meeting House Revival, a non-profit that plans to restore and revitalize a historical Black church in Corsicana, Texas, Harris is putting her beliefs into action.

East Side Chapel, built in 1916, is small, less than 2000 square feet with 24 stained glass windows. For 105 years, the chapel at 917 G.W. Jackson Highway has stood as a vibrant home for worship and service and as a historic symbol of a community’s commitment to God and to one another. The church is the site of the first Black-owned community day care and sits across from the original site of the Black high school which was demolished in the 1970’s. The old high school still has an organization of alumni who meet and organize on the East Side.

“The church sits on what was the center of the African American community at the turn of the century and it’s the oldest still standing building from that time period.  It needs to be preserved,” said Harris.

Now desperately in need of repairs, the church was in danger of being lost. The city planned to demolish the church but agreed to give it to a non-profit. Harris is taking on the challenge and plans to offer the space to the community as a place for gathering, conversation, and the arts. “I live in a town of over 200 churches, and most of them are not thriving. Even though I love the church, Corsicana doesn’t need any more churches. So, what can this space be?”

“I started Meeting House Revival as a way to salvage this space and hold it for the community. I’m trying to create something that is organic, that can be sustained by local people, and meet the needs of the Eastside community, as opposed to some outside developer coming in. The neighborhood is actually under the threat of gentrification. You have to be aware of the history of things. You have to be aware of architectural and historic loss in a community.”

The mission of the Meeting House Revival is to preserve Black history by restoring Black churches. “The vacant and neglected churches in our communities are already some of the best archives of community history. These buildings once stood as waystations for spiritual wanderers. In small towns, the church was one of the only safe havens for creative, musical, and poetic expression; it also provided a training ground for moral action. Meeting House Revival reinvigorates these spaces and restores their vital presence to the Black communities that birthed them.”  

About Alysia Nicole Harris

Growing up in Alexandria, VA, with no siblings in the house, Harris spent a lot of time on her own. “I developed a real love of just language. I wrote little stories, made lists of words that I liked.” In fifth grade, her teacher taught a lesson on poetry and, in writing her first sonnet, Harris knew that she had found her vocation. She went on to complete a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Yale and an MFA in poetry at NYU, concurrently, while also coaching a poetry team and working as a teaching assistant at Yale.  “My life was just language. I was studying language at the scientific level as a linguist – how grammar works with the brains of speakers. I was setting it in terms of poetic craft. I was performing on stages and teach kids language. It was my whole life.”

Harris spent over a decade as a performance poet, performing nationally and internationally, including at the UN, the US Embassies in Jordan and Ukraine, and The National Theatre. Her performances have garnered over 5 million views on YouTube.

Now a Pushcart -nominated poet, Harris works as a poet, linguist and teaching-artist. She is currently the Director of Public Programs at Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency. In addition, Harris also serves as arts & soul editor for Scalawag Magazine and theology editor at EcoTheo Review. Her writing can be found in Best American Poets, Indiana Review, The Offing, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Scalawag Magazine among others.

Harris brings her passion for language and the arts to her work at Meeting House Revival.

“In conversations, over and over again, people tell me there's nothing for our kids to do, there's no place for their artistic talents, their performance talents to be nurtured.  The church is right across the street from the Boys and Girls Club. If the church was revitalized, it could become a place for performance and visual arts and literary arts in connection with the Boys and Girls club. The church was the original site of Mary Peterson’s daycare which opened in 1947 as the first daycare that catered to Black single moms. It’s a continuation of the legacy that it already has.

“That’s the poet in me, right? The romantic in you just loves a good ruined structure. I’ve always wanted to restore something – something humble as opposed to preserving something that is the height of architectural significance.

What is also interesting is that there are vultures that live in the church. And that's a metaphor that I just could not make up - vultures in the church.”

Harris’ work is deeply rooted in her faith. “My life doesn't make sense unless I'm following Jesus. I have a PhD in linguistics. I'm also a journalist. And I work as an artist at a nonprofit. I've lived in Egypt. I've lived in New York, in Atlanta. Now I live in a small town in Texas. It just doesn't make sense unless I'm following Jesus. It’s an act of faith and trust. Because when you try to tell people your life story, most people have a linear trajectory. Mine is not linear at all.”

“My work is at the intersection of church and community-building. In Nehemiah, it says you will be repairers of the breach. You have to build with one hand, and you have to keep a sword in the other hand. You have to fight off what is actually meant to destroy, and you have to build at the same time.  That is an apt understanding of working with communities that are under threat.”

Harris believes in abundance and rejects the notion of scarcity. “That means stepping into things I cannot do by myself and taking one faithful step and then another. And then wait and see what God does. I mean that in a very literal way. There’s that line in scripture that says, “I will behold the glory of the Lord in the land of the living.” That’s what I want on my tombstone. “I saw the glory of the Lord in the land of the living.’

“I just have to trust that everywhere I go, I will witness the Spirit of God on display. It’s like identifying fresh fire – identifying where the Spirit of God is at work.”

Harris has big dreams for Meeting House Revival and plans to involve community members in the restoration. “I want young kids to work on that building and to have a personal connection to it, to be able to say, ‘That's a building that I helped preserve.’ I want this to serve as an opportunity for people to ask questions about their own history and be astounded by what they hear. There’s history here and history is the actual canvas you are painting on.”

Harris is planning an oral history project around the history of the church and is working with emerging community organizers to interview and video residents. She plans to create an oral history art installation in the restored chapel to re-imagine the church with people in it.

The oral history project will help tell the story of the Black community in Corsicana. “It's really easy to fall into a trap, especially in a small town that's faced economic decline, like Corsicana has, especially in a small town of entrenched racism and virulent blood which nobody likes to talk about. There was a lynching here in 1991. Let’s be real and not wash over that.”

Harris worries that Corsicana has experienced intergenerational rupture. “The middle generation leaves.  Only the elders and the young people are left and they don’t really talk to each other.  You have this despair with the way things are.” She hopes Meeting House Revival can be a place where generations interact – where people with skills in arts and crafts can teach a younger generation, offering hope to a generation where the only path out is seen in a basketball scholarship or sports career.

“I know what the arts can do. People assume you can’t make a career playing the flute or as a poet. This can give the kids the confidence and assurance that they have talents that are worth taking seriously. It’s a very prophetic moment to say ‘You are an artist, or you are a storyteller, or you are a singer. I can see it in you.”

Her plans for Meeting House Revival include a monthly speaker series that engages the topics of faith and life’s big questions. “This idea takes inspiration from the outdoor revival tradition in which visiting preachers would visit small congregations across the rural South.” Creative workshops and art intensive summer camps for students will honor the chapel’s legacy as a daycare.

“Churches, especially Black churches, were meeting houses. They were places of civic, social, and spiritual engagement. And that’s the part I really want to recover. Reviving that space for social and community investment in one another will stir the Spirit naturally. This community was an incredibly strong, flourishing community. In certain ways, it still is. People need to believe that.”

“God always goes to what’s being forgotten, what’s being discarded, what has been told it’s not worth looking at twice. Those are the places where God is actually the most at work. If you want to see the Spirit of God at work, you better go there.”

Profile written by Anita Fraley Flowers