Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo is the author of the poetry collection The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award, and a novel in verse, Nima on the Other Side, which is forthcoming from MAKE ME A WORLD/Random House. She is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019) and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Reading List

Rhapsody in Pink

Safia Elhillo  | 
Issue 69.1 Fall 2020

at brunch the waiter brings me a drink i did not order frothed inside a tiny cup another hands me the smallest fork dainty & infantile beside my boyfriend’s full cutlery we go for milkshakes & the cashier fetches a pink straw for the little lady my womanhood a second & eternal childhood of its own unequipped for […]

Short Essay on Property

Safia Elhillo  | 
Issue 69.1 Fall 2020

it is helpful to pretend that ownership is the antonym of loss that we own anything becomes a fiction if the weapon is cruel back home we all know the story about the woman whose house wallpapered & warm scrubbed white & gleaming caught the eye of the president’s wife & still furnished was taken away or the story about […]