Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (One World, 2022), featured on the Indie Bestseller list the week of September 7, 2022; and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World, 2021), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a California Book Award and an Author Honor from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. With Fatimah Asghar, she is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). 

She has received support as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and a Cave Canem Fellow. She won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 30 Under 30. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Ilia, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. She lives in Los Angeles.