Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman

Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, Ed.D. is an American educator, researcher, playwright, poet, and singer-songwriter based in Maryland. She is a co-founder, founding director, and, as of 2023, the sole owner and managing director of Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, LLC (BFHES), a research and education organization focused on Black family homeschooling.^[1][2] She is also the founder and creative director of the Liberated Muse Arts Group, a multidisciplinary performance collective, a former executive director of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation,^[3][4] and the founder of Black Writers for Peace and Social Justice, Inc.^[6] She is a professor of humanities at Coppin State University and served as the second poet laureate of Prince George's County, Maryland.^[5]

Early life and education

Ali-Coleman was born in Washington, D.C., at Columbia Hospital for Women in 1973, and grew up in Montgomery County and later Prince George's County, Maryland, the oldest of five children.^[6][9] She attended the Pan-African Institute Nation House Watoto Shule in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s and later Woodlin Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she was in fifth grade with comedian Dave Chappelle.^[9] Her family's migration from the South to Washington, D.C., and then to the surrounding counties—stemming from economic necessity and displacement—is a recurring theme in her work.^[9] She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1995, where she completed a self-designed interdisciplinary studies major in African American studies and mass media with a minor in writing.^[5][7] At UMBC, she was mentored by Professor Acklyn Lynch and Jamie Washington, experiences she describes as transformative.^[5] She went on to earn a master's degree in mass communication from Towson University and a doctorate in education from Morgan State University.^[5][8] UMBC named her an Outstanding Alumni Award recipient in 2024.^[5]

Her 2020 doctoral dissertation, Dual Enrolled African American Homeschooled Students' Perceptions of Preparedness for Community College, was a phenomenological study based on interviews with eight African American teenagers who had been homeschooled for high school while dual-enrolled in community college in Virginia, Texas, and Maryland.^[8] She defended the dissertation on Friday, March 13, 2020, through Google Hangout, as many schools and businesses were closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[9] In 2019, prior to completing her doctorate, she published a peer-reviewed article titled "Essential Pathways: An Examination of How Community College Compromise Their Unique Contribution to American Higher Education" in the journal Higher Education Politics & Economics.^[9]

Homeschooling and founding of BFHES

Ali-Coleman's personal homeschooling journey began when her daughter was in fourth grade. After a teacher asked her to tell her daughter to stop writing stories after she finished her work early because it distracted other students, Ali-Coleman described the conversation as "the most asinine conversation I've ever had with another educational professional" and decided to remove her daughter from the school.^[9] She initially used syllabi and end-of-week deadlines with her daughter in fifth grade.^[9]

She co-founded BFHES in April 2020 with Cheryl Fields-Smith, shortly after defending her dissertation, recognizing an urgent need for support among families navigating homeschooling for the first time as the pandemic began.^[5][10][1] What began as a small Facebook group connecting the founders with the handful of Black homeschooling families they had encountered through academic research grew to more than 1,000 members within its first year.^[10] BFHES has been described as the first U.S.-based research and education organization dedicated specifically to Black family homeschooling.^[2]

Homeschooling her daughter, Khari Dawson

Ali-Coleman homeschooled her daughter, Khari Dawson, intermittently throughout her education, from 2008 to 2021.^[1][11] Dawson was homeschooled for fifth and sixth grade, attended a performing arts magnet school for seventh and eighth grade, and then returned to homeschooling for high school.^[9] She described her middle school experience as "kind of like a dictatorship" due to restrictive rules, such as a ban on head wraps.^[9] She began taking classes at Prince George's Community College during ninth grade as a dual-enrolled student.^[11] Ali-Coleman has described homeschooling her daughter as a practice of "educating for liberation," emphasizing that it should be unique to each family's needs and interests.^[9] Dawson was later admitted to nearly 20 colleges and universities and offered more than $500,000 in combined scholarships, ultimately attending the University of San Francisco on a full-tuition and housing scholarship and graduating with honors in 2024 with a major in creative writing and a minor in film studies.^[11]

BFHES activities and public commentary

Since 2020, BFHES has organized an annual virtual "teach-in" bringing together homeschooling families, along with a podcast, Contemporary Perspectives on Black Homeschooling, and other online programming.^[2] According to a 2025 profile, the organization had by then provided a supportive space for over 3,000 families, with an associated Facebook group of more than 4,000 members, and was launching a microschool in Baltimore operating under the name American Institute of Homeschool Education.^[11] BFHES has also offered free virtual skill-share workshops on topics such as homeschooling children with special needs and homeschooling while maintaining outside income.^[10]

In a 2023 CNN article on the growth of Black homeschooling, BFHES was described as having been created to help families who want to homeschool but do not know where to start, and Ali-Coleman was reported as advising new homeschooling parents to begin with a mission statement outlining their goals for their children's education.^[1] A 2021 article on the TODAY Show website identified her as co-director of BFHES and quoted her stating that racism in schools plays a substantial role in Black families' decisions to homeschool.^[12] A 2022 WJLA (ABC7 Washington) report likewise quoted her describing homeschooling as something that should be shaped around each family's individual needs and goals, though the segment identified her only as "an educator who studies homeschooling" rather than by her BFHES title.^[13]

In 2022, Ali-Coleman and Fields-Smith co-edited Homeschooling Black Children in the US: Theory, Practice & Popular Culture (IAP, 2022), an anthology examining Black families' experiences with homeschooling before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.^[2] A follow-up volume, Homeschooling Black Children on a College Pathway, focused on preparing homeschooled students for college, was published in 2026 by Black Writers for Peace & Social Justice, Inc., under her sole editorship.^[9]

Academic career

Ali-Coleman has taught at Coppin State University, a historically Black university in Baltimore, where she was an associate professor of English as of late 2024, as well as at the Community College of Baltimore County and Morgan State University.^[5][14][6] In June 2026, Coppin State announced her promotion to full professor of humanities, alongside two other Black scholars.^[8] At Coppin State, she also curates the annual Reading & Writing Matters speaker series for the nonprofit Black Writers for Peace and Social Justice, of which she is executive director.^[6][15] She has also created public humanities programs for middle schoolers through Coppin State, called "Hands On Humanities".^[5]

Literary and artistic work

Beyond her academic and BFHES work, Ali-Coleman is a playwright, poet, and singer-songwriter who performs under the name Khadijah Moon.^[13][16] She is a professional member of the Dramatists Guild, the Recording Academy, and the Association of African American Museums, and her plays are catalogued on the New Play Exchange.^[7] Her mission as a creative is to "transform spaces into equitable arts spaces where people can learn and grow together".^[7]

Liberated Muse Arts Group

Ali-Coleman founded Liberated Muse in 2008, initially as an online community where artists could share news, photos, videos, and performance opportunities; the group's founding creative director, Ali-Coleman has since led it as a multidisciplinary performance company.^[17][18] Liberated Muse's mission is described as engaging intergenerational audiences through music performances and multidisciplinary productions that center the work and social-justice efforts of people of the African diaspora.^[18] In its early years, the group produced the Capitol Hip Hop Soul Fest, a Washington, D.C., hip-hop festival that ran from 2008 to 2010, which was created and produced by Ali-Coleman and Maceo Thomas in partnership through Liberated Muse.^[17] The first festival took place on July 26, 2008, in Marvin Gaye Park in the Deanwood community of Washington D.C., and featured artists such as Substantial, Kenny Wesley, gods'illa, Kokayi, Teisha Marie, Bomani Armah, and Christylez Bacon.^[17] Ali-Coleman edited two anthologies published under the Liberated Muse imprint, Liberated Muse I: How I Freed My Soul and Liberated Muse II: Betrayal Wears a Pretty Face, and in 2012 she was named to the Prince George's County Social Innovation Fund's 40 Under 40 list for her work with the group.^[17]

Since at least 2019, Liberated Muse has relied heavily on the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage program to showcase its work, a venue Ali-Coleman has described as central to sustaining small, Black-led arts organizations in Washington given persistent inequities in the District's arts-funding landscape.^[19] Liberated Muse productions presented at the Kennedy Center include Awakening: A CD Release Performance (2019); Zora Past the Sun, a musical and poetic birthday tribute to Zora Neale Hurston written and directed by Ali-Coleman and based on one of her own poems, which the group had performed at libraries and community events before the COVID-19 pandemic and then presented on the Millennium Stage on January 20, 2023, coinciding with a PBS documentary on Hurston released that same month;^[20][21][22] Voices of Freedom and Resistance (2024), also written and directed by Ali-Coleman, featuring her original songs and poetry alongside works by Bob Marley, Erykah Badu, Maya Angelou, and Billie Holiday; and The Soundtrack of Social Justice (2025).^[6] The group's earlier stage tribute In Her Words, written by Ali-Coleman, similarly celebrated the lives and work of Black cultural figures including Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday, while Running: AMOK, a musical Ali-Coleman wrote about becoming a mother, was another early Liberated Muse production.^[17] Liberated Muse also debuted the stage productions Song of a Space Cadet (2016), Ali-Coleman's one-woman show and companion album performed under her Khadijah Moon persona, and When We Were Goddesses (2017), both premiering at the Artscape festival in Baltimore.^[23]

Playwriting

Ali-Coleman's plays have been staged, workshopped, and read at venues including the Kennedy Center, Theater Alliance, the Baltimore Theatre Project, and the Anacostia Playhouse.^[7] She was a 2019 Theatre Alliance Quadrant Playwright.^[7] In that capacity she wrote Fundable, a satire set in Southeast Washington and staged as part of Theater Alliance's 2021 anthology City in Transition, a series of four short recorded plays each focused on one of the city's quadrants.^[19] Structured as a game show in which three nonprofit leaders compete for a $100,000 grant that has secretly been arranged for the sole white contestant to win, Fundable drew on Ali-Coleman's own experience navigating Washington's nonprofit and grant-funding landscape.^[19]

In June 2026, her short play The Understanding, described by a reviewer as a darkly comedic scene, was staged as part of the fourteenth annual FADE TO BLACK festival at the MATCH in Houston, Texas, a Juneteenth-weekend showcase of ten-minute works by African American playwrights presented by Shabach Enterprises.^[24]

Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation

In December 2021, Ali-Coleman was named executive director of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation (commonly referred to as the Hurston/Wright Foundation), a Washington-area nonprofit supporting Black writers, succeeding interim director Neil Stanley Henriques following a national search.^[4] She had previously served as director of education and community engagement at Montgomery Community Media.^[4] Founded in 1996, the foundation runs the Hurston/Wright Writers Week retreats and, under Ali-Coleman's leadership, launched a novel Writer-in-Residence program and began a partnership with Hachette Book Group, which cosponsored a Writers Week retreat at Rutgers University and directly funded two "Hachette fellows."^[25] A 2022 profile in DCist reported that despite the foundation's three-decade history it was still classified as an "emerging" nonprofit because of what Ali-Coleman described as inequities in how the District of Columbia's arts-funding process treated smaller, BIPOC-led organizations, and noted that the foundation's DCCAH grant had increased from about $44,000 to about $72,000 for fiscal year 2022 following changes to the commission's funding formula.^[19]

Poetry, music, and the poet laureateship

Ali-Coleman served as the second poet laureate of Prince George's County, Maryland, from 2023 to 2025.^[7] In that role she gave readings and presentations at venues including National Harbor's annual Juneteenth celebration, the Planet Word Museum's Juneteenth Black Author Fest, and Mahogany Books, where she led a "Writing as Liberation" workshop during Juneteenth week.^[26][27] As a recording artist performing under the name Khadijah Moon, she released the album Song of a Space Cadet in 2016, which included songs which led to her receiving a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for non-classical vocal performance in 2015.^[23]

Her poetry collection The Summoning of Black Joy (2023) was produced during quarantine and explores themes of grief, resilience, and the intentional act of summoning joy. The book was born, in part, from her selection as Poet Laureate: "When I was selected as a poet laureate... I believed I needed to have a book."^[9] The title poem was commissioned for an MLK celebration and speaks to the need to "reclaim our rage" in order to understand and appreciate joy.^[9]

For the Girls Who Do Too Much (2024) is a "poignant and powerful collection" that "resonates with the experiences of women of all ages."^[9] Ali-Coleman describes it as her most vulnerable work, written as she approached age 50 and processed the 10th anniversary of her mother's death. She noted: "A lot of the poems I rarely talk about... it's been a reckoning with this changing body."^[9]

Her collection A Park Stands on All of Our Graves was published in November 2025. The book was inspired by the October 7, 2023 devastation in Palestine and the recognition of how parks in Israel were once homelands of Palestinian people—a theme she connects to Black history in the United States.^[9] The collection has received critical praise: author Synnika A. Lofton called it "a unique form of militant jazz" that explores "identity, resistance, social justice, history, culture, and the American machine's cringeworthy hypocrisy;" poet Derrick Weston Brown described it as "the rough root medicine we need for what ails us in these menacing times;" and Truth Thomas, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Howard County, Maryland, called it "a fierce lament against racism's violence wherever it raises its demon-like head in the world."^[34]

Selected works

Books (Authored)

• A Park Stands on All of Our Graves (Black Writers for Peace & Social Justice, November 2025).^[8][7]
• For the Girls Who Do Too Much (2024).^[8][7]
• The Summoning of Black Joy (2023).^[8][7]
• Halos for Heroes, Friends, and a Few People I Don't Like (April 2026).^[7]
• Mariah's Maracas (2018) – children's book.^[5]

Books (Edited or Co-Edited)

• Homeschooling Black Children in the US: Theory, Practice & Popular Culture (Co-edited with Cheryl Fields-Smith, IAP, 2022).^[2]
• Homeschooling Black Children on a College Pathway (Editor, Black Writers for Peace & Social Justice, Inc., 2026).^[9]
• Liberated Muse I: How I Freed My Soul (Editor).^[17]
• Liberated Muse II: Betrayal Wears a Pretty Face (Editor).^[17]

Book Chapters

• Ali-Coleman, K. Z. (2021). The Depiction of Homeschooling, Black Identity, and Political Thought in the Film Black Panther. In R. T. White & K. A. Ritzenhoff (Eds.), Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness. Lexington Books.^[9]

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• Ali-Coleman, K. Z. (2019). Essential Pathways: An Examination of How Community Colleges Compromise Their Unique Contribution to American Higher Education. Higher Education Politics & Economics, 5(1), 54-69.^[9]

CNN feature and public appearances

On February 22, 2025, Ali-Coleman was featured in a segment on CNN's "First of All with Victor Blackwell" titled "Liberated Muse Takes Stage At Kennedy Center Amid Trump Takeover."^[28] The segment highlighted Liberated Muse's decision to proceed with their performance, "Soundtrack of Social Justice," at the Kennedy Center despite the recent upheaval at the institution following President Trump's appointment as its chairman.^[28]

In the interview, Ali-Coleman explained that the performance was booked prior to the election and that she saw it as important to move forward with the show. "I will not be cowed by someone who is using their position to bully and to disenfranchise people further at a time like this," she told CNN. "Rather than shutter what it is that we are offering or withdraw it, now more than ever, it needs to be front and center."^[28] She framed the group's work as being "consistently devoted to messages of resistance and liberation," and tied the performance to the social justice landscape of the moment.^[28]

On October 19, 2024, she was interviewed by Nicole Young-Martin for the podcast "Black Writers Read," where she discussed her poetry collections, her creative process, and her role as a culture keeper.^[9]

On May 9, 2026, she was a featured panelist at the 10th annual Books in Bloom festival in Columbia, Maryland, alongside Jason Reynolds and Sasa Aakil. During the panel, she discussed the importance of collaboration, her journey as a writer, and the influence of Washington D.C.'s literary community on her work.^[9]

Other work

Ali-Coleman is the founder, President, and CEO of Black Writers for Peace and Social Justice, Inc. (BWPSJ), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization she established in 2024 to provide skill-building learning experiences and opportunities for Black writers, and to offer administrative training and services for literary and community-based organizations.^[6][29] The organization envisions "a world where stories are tools for liberation, the arts are central to social justice movements, and diverse voices lead the way toward understanding, empathy, justice, and equity."^[6]

BWPSJ's flagship program is the annual "Writing for Liberation Virtual Teach-In," held during Black August, which gathers Black writers for workshops, craft talks, podcast interviews, and readings. The inaugural teach-in in 2025 featured over 100 registered writers and showcased more than a dozen Black writers, including Prince Shakur, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Nicole Young-Martin.^[6] The organization also publishes the digital literary journal Rebel's Zeitgeist, which "seeks to publish work that challenges the status quo, offers new perspectives on systemic injustices, and celebrates the rich diversity of the Black experience."^[6] Additional BWPSJ programs include writing workshops and retreats, public readings, a Youth Media Academy, and partnerships with library systems and independent bookstores.^[6] In less than two years, the organization has provided services, supports, and opportunities to over 500 writers.^[6]

Ali-Coleman has also participated in public discussions on Black homeschooling and literary arts. On November 8, 2023, she was a featured panelist for the "Homeschooling Black Children in the U.S." event, joining Dr. Sherri Mehta and Tracie Yorke.^[30] On September 28, 2023, she was a panelist for the session "Give Birth to Brightness: The Enduring Legacy of Black Literary Arts Institution" at the International Black Writers Festival at Howard University, alongside Brenda Greene, Lauren K. Alleyne, Ayesha Hardison, and Glory Edim, with Dana A. Williams moderating.^[31]

BFHES and its founders have been referenced in broader press coverage of the growth of Black homeschooling in the United States, including in The Guardian, The Final Call, Wired, Today, and The Baltimore Times.^{[32][33][10][12][11]} Additional national coverage of the broader Black-homeschooling trend, including pieces in The Washington Post, Slate, and USA Today, has quoted Ali-Coleman or Fields-Smith on the subject without naming BFHES directly.^[2] Separately, her theatrical and musical work has been covered in outlets including the Washington Post, DCist, and the AFRO, and she has been a featured presenter for events such as Artscape, presented by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.^[19][21][23]

References