Heart-wrenching yet delicate words from Williamsburg-based author, poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan have appeared everywhere from The New York Times and The Missouri Review to Poetry Magazine and Guernica. At intimate readings hosted for Brooklyn’s literary community in her own backyard, Alyan can appear soft-spoken. Don’t be fooled.

There’s real power behind this Palestinian- American’s voice, encapsulated in stanzas of her acclaimed poetry volume “The Twenty-Ninth Year,” an elegiac autobiography that leaps from war-torn cities in the Middle East to Brooklyn brownstones as easily as it does from alcoholism to recovery. One poem titled “Moral Inventory” offers a particular gut punch: “Maybe I’m more like Manhattan than I want to admit: prettier when lit.”

Born in Carbondale, Illinois, Alyan also grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine and Lebanon. Her family moved to Kuwait but sought political asylum in the U.S. when Iraqi forces invaded the country. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and has practiced part-time at NYU’s Counseling Center — an intense technical training that taught Alyan to navigate the tenuous emotions at play throughout her own writing.

She’s also a novelist and actress. Her 2017 debut novel, “Salt Houses,” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. Her sophomore novel, “The Arsonist’s City” (2021), shares a rich family story and a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East. Kirkus Reviews called it “painful and joyous, sad and funny — impossible to put down.”

In addition to publishing Alyan’s poetry, The New Yorker reviewed “Tallahassee,” a short film Alyan created and stars in with Darine Hotait, where “a woman covers up her struggles, and finds herself disconnected at a family celebration.” The film was nominated for Best Narrative Short Film at the Cairo Shorts Film Festival last December.

Walk into the current exhibit at the Museum of Future Experiences (MoFE) and you will be asked to contemplate the ancient question: “Who am I?” The MoFE take is that we’re all connected, woven inextricably together in the great cosmic quilt. It’s not, of course, a new point of view. What’s different here is how the folks at MoFE nudge you to that awareness — through a 20ish-minute guided meditation-poem with your eyes closed, followed by an equally long, surreal virtual reality experience featuring forests, fractals, splitting cells and one giant floating space fetus. (The evocation of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is not totally accidental.)

David Askaryan is the CEO and founder of MoFE, which is based in Williamsburg and is the latest local take on the sort of immersive experiences that seek to stimulate all five senses while simultaneously catering to the Instagram crowd. Previous exhibit-experiences since MoFE opened last June have included a riff on liminal spaces as well as a spooky virtual Halloween story set in Florida.

“Our core mission is to show people something they’ve never seen before,” Askaryan tells Brooklyn Magazine. In showing people something new, he says, MoFE is by definition offering a future experience.

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Askaryan, who is ethnically Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan. By the time he was 5, his family had moved to Uzbekistan and then Moscow before landing in Tampa, Florida. He has worked in the world of finance — from venture capital to hedge funds — but he’s also been a traveling musician and on staff at a slew of theater productions of the experimental kind.

It is no surprise, then, that MoFE is also more than one thing. Part immersive space and part production studio, the destination showcases the many facets of the VR experience by making use of a state-of-the art speaker system that allows for 360-degree soundscapes. Askaryan is already dreaming of expanding into other cities and offering the museum as a subscription-based online hub for virtual visitors with headsets at home.

“Seeing something you’ve never seen before is a great way to experience curiosity, awe, to see what’s possible,” he says. In an era of data-driven storytelling, he adds, “those feelings are getting more and more rare. And those feelings are an important part of being a human.”

Elijah Bah opened his vegetarian and vegan-friendly cafe, Nûrish, on Washington Avenue just four months before the pandemic shut the city down.

“During the time when we’re supposed to be busy and flourishing is when the pandemic hit,” he told Inside Hook in 2020. “So it’s like, whoa, but it does make it a lot easier for me just because everyone else is going through the same thing, so it’s not like I’m alone in this. The whole world is going through it.” He pivoted to takeout and curbside just like everyone else who muddled through, plus he teamed up with World Central Kitchen to provide meals for healthcare workers at nearby hospitals.

Bah is nothing if not resilient. Born in Guinea, he immigrated to the Bronx at 14 before ultimately landing in Brooklyn. Since high school, he’s worked in kitchens at predominantly vegetarian places that relied on local resources. The menu he’s crafted at Nûrish — just on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — does just what the name promises. There are hearty yet simple salads, sandwiches, wraps, smoothies, breakfast platters and grain bowls that lean into his veggie-centric West African heritage, plus sustainable meat options so carnivores don’t feel left out.

His survival in an industry rife with failure is a testament not only to his cooking, but to his personality. Walk into Nûrish today at any given time and you’re likely to find him working the espresso machine or schmoozing with his patrons.

“People walk in here all the time and look for the owner while I’m standing right there. I want to be visible and show that yes, we are able to do this as young Black men,” he told Black-Owned Brooklyn, adding, “A guy like me — you know, an immigrant from Guinea with a high school diploma — is not supposed to have something like this in a neighborhood like this.”

Donnel Baird dreams big — like, saving- the-planet big. And he is starting right here in Brooklyn.

Born and raised in Bed- Stuy, Baird grew up in an apartment with a dysfunctional heating system. He was far from alone: Around 70 percent of the city’s buildings use oil- or gas-powered boilers, many of them rundown to the point of inefficiency, many of them spewing potentially dangerous fumes.

In Brownsville, for example, 73 percent of residential buildings have some kind of “maintenance defect,” resulting in asthma rates close to double the New York City average.

Baird didn’t start thinking about the potential synergy of mitigating the climate crisis and tackling socioeconomic issues until his time as an undergrad at Duke. After graduating, he became a community organizer in Brooklyn and then worked for the Obama administration’s energy department retrofitting low-income residences across the city with more energy-efficient electric heating systems.

At Columbia Business School, he developed an idea so good that the U.S. Department of Energy invested $2 million into it — while he was still a student. The pitch: Create a private company that could perform similar residential energy system retrofitting on a large enough scale to actually dent the climate crisis and create equity in low- income communities.

The question was how such an entity could become and stay profitable. The answer: It would shave off so much of the energy costs that the company and its investors could all get a cut of the savings. Plus, solar panels on residential roofs for maximum green efficiency would actually create surplus energy, which could be stored in basement batteries and sold back to energy grids — in Baird’s vision, by local-owned cooperatives. And the installation of all the systems could create construction and other jobs in the communities.

With the initial funding, Baird founded BlocPower in 2012. Since then, the company has retrofitted over 1,200 buildings and is now working with the city of Ithaca on the country’s first citywide residential electrification project (with the help of millions from the likes of Microsoft and Goldman Sachs). It has been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Time and Fast Company.

“I just know in my bones that we can address the climate crisis at scale,” Baird told Fast Company in March. “I don’t know if we will. But I know we can.”

Fela Barclift has not only raised her four children in Bed-Stuy, she’s educated four generations of Bed-Stuy kids.

In 1981, after looking for a daycare that would give her eldest exposure to people who looked like her — and had books that championed Black heroes and dolls that were Black and brown — she came up woefully short. Recalling her own traumatic schooling in the South, Barclift decided to start her own school. She launched Little Sun People preschool in her brownstone the following year.

“I see the difference when we teach our children about having pride in themselves, their family, their community and who they are,” “Mama” Fela told the Associated Press last year. “It creates such a strong sense of self-assurance and a sense of confidence and belonging.”

For 40 years now, Barclift has fostered a community around an Afrocentric worldview, teaching kids about trailblazers like Rosa Parks and Malcom X decades before “critical race theory” entered (and became warped by) the public discourse. “Everything I had ever heard about Africa was negative, horrible. And I didn’t want to be associated with that,” Barclift told Spectrum News NY1 last fall.

That vision has paid off not just for hundreds of Brooklyn youth, but for Barlcift herself, who was named one of the winners of last fall’s David Prize, an annual $200,000 award for select New York City residents, named after billionaire real estate developer David C. Walentas of Two Trees Management Company.

“I remember learning Swahili, how to play the drum, lots of reading, singing Afrocentric songs and being a part of culturally based shows,” one Little Sun People alum wrote in New York Amsterdam News in 2017.

Since her early days, Barclift has earned a bachelor’s degree in education and political science from Brooklyn College, and a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Bank Street College.

Next up, she plans to extend her school to include kindergarten through fifth grade and is authoring a book of poetry and affirmations for young Black and brown children that can be used in classrooms everywhere.

“My educational experience was a nightmare, to say the least,” Barclift told NY1. “I never felt like I belonged.” She does now.

Pick any flavor at Malai, the Carroll Gardens ice cream parlor that’s among the very best in New York City, and founder Pooja Bavishi can tell you a story about it, usually involving a childhood memory: Her parents immigrated to North Carolina from Gujarat, northwest India, though these days they live in Brooklyn.

Although Bavishi is a determined entrepreneur — a graduate of both the London School of Economics and NYU’s Stern School of Business, who turned a makeshift booth at the Hester Street Fair in 2015 into a beloved operation that ships nationwide — the ice cream at Malai remains deeply personal, with each of the nearly 50 flavors a way for her to explore, preserve and celebrate her Indian heritage.

“Every single flavor at Malai is sparked by a memory of India,” Bavishi told the India Food Network last year. “We have a carrot halwa flavor and that’s inspired by my dad, who loves the Indian sweet. But he will only eat carrot halwa with a scoop of ice cream. Obviously, I needed to create this flavor. We also have a sweet corn saffron, and that references my memories of eating the makai do sheero halwa that my [aunt] used to make.”

In addition to making excellent ice cream (and baked goods; do not sleep on her Gulab Jamun Ice Cream Cake), Bavishi embraces her role as leader, collaborator and mentor. “Being a woman of color in any leadership position presents additional obstacles and setbacks than what one might otherwise face,” she told Gothamist when the parlor first opened. “Every step that we take legitimizes Malai even more, and it makes us a more established player in the ice cream world and in the New York food scene. Which is important for me and for other women who might follow.”

Last summer, Bed-Stuy model and actress Leyna Bloom made a historic splash as the first transgender woman of color to grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Before that, in 2019, she was the first transgender actor of color to premiere a movie at the Cannes Film Festival. “I need to do things, I need to tell stories, I need to dance in ways that can express harmony and emotions differently,” Bloom said at the time. “So people can see things differently and maybe they can learn about people like me.”

Bloom moved to New York when she was 17 and eventually found her way to Bed-Stuy, a place with “a lot of the culture of Black and brown bodies,” Bloom said. In those early days in the city, she joined a ballroom community that helped her through homelessness. She was discovered in a store while casually flipping through a lookbook of Victoria’s Secret models. The person who discovered her? The wife of the photographer who took the pictures Bloom was looking at. Since that fateful discovery, she has starred in the Martin Scorsese-produced film “Port Authority” and had a recurring role in the final season of “Pose.”

What comes next for Bloom is clear: “My mission before I die is to be on the cover of every magazine I’ve ever wanted to be on. I’m young, I’m in my prime, I can do that,” she said to Interview Magazine.

When Halsey & Lewis was forced to shutter in July of 2021, the loss of the eclectic Black-owned record shop and community hub came as a blow to its Bed-Stuy neighbors. Fortunately, owners Martin Brewer and Sonya Farrell have gotten used to pivoting. (Brewer ran his previous shop, Tangerine, in a pre-gentrified Park Slope from 1997 to 2002 until the rent got too damn high.)

In February, Brewer and Farrell reopened Halsey & Lewis in Bed-Stuy, this time on Madison Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. In April, they renamed it Black Star Vinyl (the name Halsey & Lewis had been a reference to the intersection of the store’s previous location). There you will find Brewer on any given day, just as likely to suggest a Nina Simone record as he is a book of photographs, vintage decor or junkyard art.

The new store is spacious and across the street from the Israel Putnam Playground. That’s by design. Farrell is also a real estate agent and found a location where Black Star can begin to host the community again. The new shop with a new name is the right size to throw concerts, movie nights and DJ sets, all of which Black Star Vinyl has in the works.

When the city ordered businesses to pause regular services because of Covid in the spring of 2020, Brewer and Farrell pivoted to delivery and curbside pickup. Farrell also created #ShareTheHealth, a program to provide resources to Brooklyn homeless shelters. Friends and fans of their store pooled resources to provide money, masks and other sanitary items to the most vulnerable Brooklynites at the height of the pandemic.

Farrell also runs Let’s Get on the Bus, an organization that provides enriching field trips for underserved youth to promote civic engagement and social justice. Their most frequent destination is the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.