Safia Elhillo

Elhillo is an American-Sudanese poet and writer based in Washington, DC. She is a Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly: a journal of black expression. She received an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She is currently working on her first full-length collection, The January Children, which is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2017. She has performed at TEDxNewYork, the South African State Theatre, the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway, and TV1’s Verses & Flow. She is currently a teaching artist with Split This Rock and a poetry editor at Kinfolks. (www.safia-mafia.com)