IIf your TikTok FYP (meaning “For Your Page” for the crazy ones out there) has a bit of raging Gen Z youth, then you’ve definitely seen Aliza Grace’s poems, or at least come across one of hers. very, very admired.
Born in West Virginia, the 19-year-old poet has more than 600,000 followers on TikTok and has published 16(!) poetry books on Amazon. This also includes a diary and coffee table book with words and quotes by Lana Del Rey, a tribute to the melancholy queen who inspired Grace, and of course an easily digestible, sad girl food coffee table book. In some ways his poems also try to be adjacent to the LDR. Grace’s latest video, which has over 2 million views, features a poem that reads, “This makes me sick / how much I was in love with you // the point is that I never fell in love with you / I was in love with a version of you / a version I made up.”
In another popular post, “This is your sign / check your phone / Look at TikTok likes / Insta saved…” If you haven’t figured it out yet, many of Grace’s poems look at themes of heartbreak, teenage love, and emotion. being disappointed in a relationship. Its feed is a homogeneous sea of black and white videos tuned to moody, internet-friendly, heartache melodies like “Space Jet”, “Romantic Homicide” or any other slow and echo-heavy song. All his posts follow the same format: in each video, one of his books, set on a pearly white crushed cloth, opens to a random page of poetry.
In a platform where creators are forced to change their content for clicks, Grace succeeds with simple consistency. Many of his poems are uncanny, epigrammatic sentences structured with abrupt line breaks to add perceived character, like what you’d find on a greeting card or animated Instagram page. Cue: “you / kiss me / and the world stops spinning.” This much. That’s the whole poem, and it’s been viewed 149,000 times and has hundreds of comments like “how do you know what I’m feeling” and “I’m so obsessed with your job”. This praise is not limited to TikTok. Grace’s Amazon and Goodreads reviews also get their fair share of heartfelt compliments. The most common rhetoric is that his poetry is relatable and captures how many readers feel.
If the young poet’s work reminds you of Rupi Kaur, Atticus, RM Drake or any other notorious social media writer, you are not alone. Frankly, Grace is to an older generation Z what Kaur is to millennials new to Instagram’s pithy shots. And like the Canadian poet who has sold over 11 million copies and is still largely discredited and despised, the promising 19-year-old faces endless hate online. A user on Twitter reposted Grace’s poem and boldly said, “how do you call it poetry“-And This It’s among the nicer reviews, so you can only imagine how wild things got.
Photo Illustration: Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and /TikTok
But even if you set aside all the intellectual and literary biases, it’s hard to defend Grace because many of her poems have been blatantly copied from writers big and small, singers, canonical poets or… Instagram memes. In fact, her poet friend Sabina Laura has an ongoing 65 tweets long viral thread He records every poem the 19-year-old plagiarizes, along with side-by-side pictures of the same work from its original creator. These include Laura’s poems along with Kristina Mahr, Chloe Frayne, Lang Leav and Beau Taplin, a Lady Gaga quote, Phoebe Bridgers lyrics, and numerous public screenshots that have been circulating in WhatsApp groups over the years.
Laura’s Twitter thread has over 6,500 likes and has been shared nearly 3,000 times, with more recently copied poems appearing as recently as February 2023. With plagiarism so publicly and meticulously documented, the first question that comes to mind is how does Aliza Grace come to be? is it far from that? It seems that the poet treats plagiarism-markers the same way we treat a toxic ex – he blocks them everywhere. As I narrated the story, I witnessed it in real time. One day his post received several comments accusing him of taking people’s work, the next day all the comments were gone. As if they never existed.
“I commented on the video and said ‘this is my poem’, I was immediately blocked on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok and then I realized that this is not going to go well.”
— Kristina Mahr
To hear Grace’s side, I commented on her videos explaining that I was a writer interested in her poetry. I even omitted the trigger “p” word. Looks like I’m not private either and was quickly blocked. I found her stable, private Instagram and sent a follow request. Two weeks later he surprised me and let me in! There were 14 odd posts, most of whom had boyfriends and made little or no reference to their poetry. After a quick review and following, I started texting him and within seconds his profile disappeared. Instagram said the account I was looking for no longer exists. Maybe having a “journalist” in my bio gave me away.
After tracking down a page that looked like Grace’s Facebook profile page, we tried to contact her through that platform as well. His phone number and email are not public, and The Daily Beast has exhausted various ways to contact him.
Both Laura and Mahr tried to confront Grace for stealing her poems and suffered the same fate. “I commented on the video and said, ‘This is my poem.’ I was immediately blocked on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, and then I realized that it wasn’t going to go very well,” explains Mahr. It later filed separately against TikTok and Amazon with allegations of intellectual property theft. Fortunately, Mahr’s poetry collection was published by Amazon in 2020, while Grace’s book containing the same poem was published in 2021. As a result, it was not difficult to prove plagiarism, and this book of the young poet was immediately received. It was shut down by Amazon and the posts were deleted by TikTok.
However, Laura explains that a few weeks later, Grace republished the work on both platforms and continues to profit from the stolen works. “I’m guessing at least 100 people have told me they reported Aliza’s TikTok, but the platform did nothing,” she says. I’ve also reached out to Amazon and TikTok and have yet to receive a response.
The next step would be the legal route, as the devs haven’t taken any permanent action, but spoiler alert: That didn’t work either. Mahr worked with a copyright attorney to issue a termination letter, but despite intense efforts, they were unable to find a functional email or mailing address for the poet. “We couldn’t find any contact information. Even if this is his real name, there is no evidence, so there is no way to take action against someone with so few traces,” he explains.
Surely there must be a better solution to handle plagiarism on such a large scale, right? Jonathan Bailey, a former poet and journalist, Plagiarism Today in 2005 to help independent creators resolve these copyright issues. After her work was stolen by over 700 artists, she decided to navigate the world of online copying on her own.
“If the creator’s work exists on Instagram or any time-stamped social media platform, they have proof of when it was posted. But it’s hard to involve Amazon in the plagiarism wars,” says Bailey. The problem is that they don’t invest their resources in checking the ledgers for stolen business as it takes time and money, which is not ethical for the platform.”
On the other hand, as a photo and video-focused app, TikTok spends its limited energy checking song and video copyrights, so detecting text in a post and flagging it is a much bigger investment in the app, Bailey explains: It is very important to draw.”
Unfortunately, these vast limitations expose young poets and writers to plagiarists like Grace, who rely on a massive social media following and continue to profit from popularity. “He has a lot of fans defending him. Some don’t believe he stole anything and others don’t care what he does. His books impress them, so they still want to buy them no matter what,” adds Laura.
Some fans feel it’s not their responsibility to care if Grace’s work is copied or not. Although generally considered to be on the same level as Kaur, there is an unmistakable distinction between the two. Kaur is a Canadian poet whose South Asian identity, violent on-camera presence and offline interactions frame her fame and reputation, whereas Grace has carefully removed any authorial presence in her poetry. Social media feeds only share their text. We have no idea what Grace looks like and we’ve never heard of her reciting poetry. Fans are only there for the words. There is Aliza Grace’s signature on how fans identify with the work, but no devotion or admiration for the poet herself.
For a fandom to be created and then wronged, the celebrity must engage in at least a minimal parasocial relationship, which is completely absent here. Grace takes advantage of the easy associativity of her stolen poetry. On fast-food platforms like TikTok, all-lowercase abbreviated stanzas without punctuation are featured to discuss heartbreak and tell people how to move on.
“Whether literary critics appreciate Grace’s poetry or not, it functions as community building and creates aesthetic value,” says Christian Bök, an experimental poet specializing in working on quatrains on the internet where theorists don’t count as poetry. In his view, poets like Grace, who appeal to non-traditional readers, act as a remedy to poetry and make an otherwise resistant institution more welcoming.
Despite a workgroup that almost looks like plagiarism, a serious lack of human presence, and a TikTok account that pops up the same format over and over, Grace remains a famous creator on the platform. Users respond to his poems with personal experience and comments like “it hurts”, “I wish I could send this to him” and “I missed him so much”.
Moral values aside, the only strategy that keeps her incessant stream of poetry alive and successful is to make people feel seen for Grace’s words, just like other cores and clans on social media. Apparently on TikTok this is enough to keep you going until plagiarism is taken more seriously.