Safia Elhillo

“I am rapt, finding here the hurt and the heft of girlhood. All the old silences, all the unuttered shames are ruptured, tended to, and—finally—named. Elhillo is a poet of wisdom, rigor, and vindicating care.” —Tracy K. Smith

“Elhillo’s poems dig deep into how shame is passed down generations of women. With these conversations comes power. Elhillo sings of the autonomy she imagines for her girls.” —NPR

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, 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 Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor. Her second novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit (Random House, 2024) is an unflinching exploration of a teenager’s journey into the poetry scene and the dangerous new relationship that could threaten all her dreams.

Of Elhillo’s most recent poetry collection, Aracelis Girmay notes, “Safia Elhillo traces the ongoing devastations of patriarchy while simultaneously making a refuge out of language, kinship, and sound. Electric, violet, plural with girls, this work pulses with memory and refusal, awakening language with its lucid imagination. Girls That Never Die is a book of resuscitations. Brilliant. And fierce.” In an interview with Hazem Fahmy, Elhillo spoke to the relationship between music and poetics in her work: “My poetics are really interested in memory; its failures and mysteries. For me, a song is like a container of the emotion I felt in the early days of encountering the song. When I talk about, or refer to, music, it’s shorthand for me engaging with some sort of memory or feeling that’s frozen in a moment. Music does so much locating and contextual work. Economy in a poem is very important to me, so I love being able to create a landscape and a time period just by naming a song.”

Elhillo’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. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020.

Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received 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, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet.

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Bright Red Fruit

Novel, 2024

Bad girl. No matter how hard Samira tries, she can’t shake her reputation. She’s never gotten the benefit of the doubt—not from her mother or the aunties who watch her like a hawk.Samira is determined to have a perfect summer filled with fun parties, exploring DC, and growing as a poet—until a scandalous rumor has her grounded and unable to leave her house. When Samira turns to a poetry forum for solace, she catches the eye of an older, charismatic poet named Horus. For the first time, Samira feels wanted. But soon she’s keeping a bigger secret than ever before—one that that could prove her reputation and jeopardize her place in her community.In this gripping coming-of-age novel from the critically acclaimed author Safia Elhillo, a young woman searches to find the balance between honoring her family, her artistry, and her authentic self.

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Girls That Never Die

Poetry, 2022

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:[what if i will not die][what will govern me then]

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Home Is Not A Country

Novel, 2021

“Nothing short of magic. One of the best writers of our times.” –Elizabeth Acevedo

Nima doesn’t feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn’t.

As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen, the name her parents didn’t give her at birth: Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might just be more real than Nima knows. And more hungry.And the life Nima has, the one she keeps wishing were someone else’s…she might have to fight for it with a fierceness she never knew she had.

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Halal If You Hear Me

Anthology, 2019

The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities.

Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.

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The January Children

Poetry, 2017

In her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, “The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1.” What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one’s own land.

“The first sound of what will be a remarkable noise in African poetry. Safia Elhillo has already laid out in this collection a complex foundation for a rich and complex body of work. What is unmistakable is her authority as a poet—she writes with great control and economy, but also with a vulnerability that is deeply engaging. Above all, her poems are filled with delight—a quality of humor that is never trite but always honest and insightful.” —from the foreword by Kwame Dawes

Read What’s In Print

• “I move like a poet in my entire life”: An Interview with Safia Elhillo – Apogee Journal

• Searching For the Words to Describe Myself – Harpers Bazaar

• A Poet Crafts a Verse Novel for Teens – Kirkus Reviews

• Conversation: “Really? The nation state is the hill you want to die on?”

• Home Is Not A Country Imagines The Lives We Could Have Led – NPR

• Everything Lost Will Be Given a Name: Safia Elhillo – The Brooklyn Rail

• Review: The January Children by Safia Elhillo – Muzzle Magazine

Listen to Audio

• Safia Elhillo takes a leap in new poems, writes about shame and the body – NPR

• Ladan Osman and Safia Elhillo: “Intimate Archives and Reimagined Histories” – A Long House

• Read “The Cairo Apartments: A poem for Sunday” by Safia Elhillo – The Atlantic