Poet Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C. She came to poetry through spoken word, participating on a youth slam team in high school and co-founding NYU’s slam team as a freshman. She holds a BA from NYU and an MFA in poetry from the New School.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; the national bestseller Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022); and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a California Book Award and a Coretta Scott King Book Award author honor. Her most recent novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2024), was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks.
Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in Poetry, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among other journals, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020.
She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Cave Canem fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, Ilia, and the Bavarian State Ballet.
-
More Safia Elhillo
Video: Watch an animated interpretation of Elhillo's poem "To Make Use of Water" from TED-Ed
Text: Read poems by Elhillo at the Academy of American Poets
Audio: Elhillo appears on NPR's Morning Edition to discuss her book Girls That Never Die
-
Photo by Nicholas Nichols.