Ali Rachel Pearl is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California, where she previously earned a PhD from the Department of English and a certificate in Digital Media + Culture from the School of Cinematic Arts. She is a writer, teacher, and community organizer whose work focuses on gentrification, place-making, archives, surveillance, and policing. Her writing appears in Kenyon Review Online; Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology; Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures; Redivider; DIAGRAM; The New York Times; and elsewhere. Formerly, she served as fiction editor at Copper Nickel (c. 2008) and editor-in-chief at Gold Line Press (c. 2017). She and her husband live in Los Angeles after losing their Altadena home in the 2025 Eaton Fire.
Ali’s on-going community work focuses on the material circumstances of her former neighborhood for over a decade, East Hollywood, and her current neighborhood of Altadena. Alongside her journalist neighbors, Ali has developed arts and educational materials that highlight East Hollywood’s history of redlining and co-organized a public art campaign & panel series on redlining, gentrification, and housing in the area. The team is currently running a newsletter on substack called Making A Neighborhood which shares journalistic reporting, photo essays, interviews, long-form storytelling, book reviews, local histories, portraits of East Hollywood, and reflections on community making in an effort to not only document this rapidly changing neighborhood, but to connect the struggles and resilience of the area to neighborhoods across the city, state, and country.
In Altadena, Ali serves as a neighborhood captain with the job of connecting her neighbors to resources post-fire and she is working with fellow Altadenans to build a community land trust rooted in anti-displacement.