Spring 2024 | Safia Elhillo | Vol. 7, Iss. 3
Welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Each issue gives you a 360-degree view of a Black poet, including an interview, new poems, a critical essay, and a writing prompt inspired by our featured poet.
Sudanese-American poet, Safia Elhillo is the award-winning author two collections of poetry, The January Children and Girls That Never Die, as well as the novels-in-verse Home Is Not A Country, and the recently published Bright Red Fruit. She is also co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Her work has appeared in POETRY, 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. She is the recipient of several awards and honors including the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and she was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Elhillo’s work has been translated in to several languages, and she has performed all around the world.
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- Interview: Safia Elhillo speaks with L. Renée about falling into poetry, her identity as a diasporic Sudanese poet, and her rituals for writing
- Critical Essay: Dr. Gbenga Adesina considers Ehlhillo’s “dismantled paradise” and its relation to building self-in-diaspora
- Poems: Read “Portrait of Christopher,” “Outdoor Waiting Area, Glendale Tires,” “Pyschogeography.”
- Writing Prompt: Words are the building blocks of poems. Gather your bricks, and build away!
Read the transcription here
Cover Design by Robert Mott
Cover Photo: Joaquin Sosa
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