Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House 2021), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee (receiving a special mention for the 2016 Pushcart Prize), co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Safia’s work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland. Source

origin stories (reprise)

i was born in the winter in 1990 in a country not my own

i was born with my father’s eyes maybe i stole them he

doesn’t look like that anymore i was born

in seven countries i was born carved up by borders

i was born with a graveyard of languages for teeth i was

born to be a darkness in an american boy’s bed or i

was born with many names to fill the quiet i forget

which one is mine i forget what is silence &

what is a language i cannot speak i was born

crookedhearted born ticking born on the

subway platform at 103rd st fainting blood sliding

around thin as water in my body i was born

to the woman who caught me floating into the train & to

every pair of hands keeping me from dying my mother’s

cool fingers snaking my hair into braids my grandmother’s

thick knuckles collecting my feet in her lap & my own

cupped for rainwater raising every day to my own mouth

to drink

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Family

Identity

Intersectionality & Culture

Poems of Place