Let Me Give You the Zeit:
On a Poetics of the Third Space
With Safia Elhillo
A poetics of the third space is a hybrid poetry that expresses the fluidity and tension of identity.
What does it mean to write a migrant experience, an experience of two cultural identities imposed on one another? We will look at poems that combine Arabic(s) and English(es) and observe the ways they create specificity, use the untranslatability of their double languages to create tension, and imagine different “true readers” than the ones usually centered by Anglophone literature.
This session will be recorded; the recording will be available to participants until December 19, 2026. Participants will be part of a Zoom Meeting with Safia Elhillo, which means everyone will have the option to turn cameras on (although that is not required to participate). By joining the class, participants consent to being recorded (only if they opt to turn their camera on). As noted above, the recording will be available to class participants only for a limited time; the recording will not be shared for any other purpose.
While this class is designed as a participatory workshop, it can be purchased to be viewed asynchronously (not live) for a similar experience.
DETAILS
Let Me Give You the Zeit: On a Poetics of the Third Space
(A Zoom class to attend in person or watch later)
Dates
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Time
1:00-2:30 PM ET
Cost
$90 USD
“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.”
—
Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of the books The January Children, Girls That Never Die, Home Is Not A Country, and Bright Red Fruit. 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.