Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She 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; Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), which was featured on the Indie Bestseller list; 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 California Book Award. Her latest novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2024), was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, a Printz honor book, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and selected as one of the New York Public Library’s best books of the year. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). Her latest collection, Psychogeography, is forthcoming in 2027 from One World/Random House. Safia’s fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Howard Fellowship from the Howard Foundation at Brown University. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Ilia, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet, and appears in The Penguin Book of Migration Literature and The New Yorker, among others. She is a co-poetry editor at Callaloo and teaches in the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch and Pacific Universities.