Photo by Stephanie Land
Born in Zaria, Nigeria, HAFIZAH GETER's poetry and prose have appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Indelible in the Hippocampus, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She is an editor for Little A and TOPPLE Books from Amazon Publishing, and serves on the poetry committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival. Her debut poetry collection UN-AMERICAN is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in Fall 2020.
From 2014-2019 Hafizah co-curated the poetry reading series EMPIRE with Ricardo Maldonado. Formerly the Vice President of the AWP Women's Caucus, she has previously served as a member of the Board of Directors of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, as an assistant editor at YesYes Books, and poetry editor at Phantom Books. She has previously worked for Cave Canem, PEN America, and Poets House.
A 2018 92Y Women in Power Fellow and a 2018 VONA/Voices Fellow in Essay Writing selected by Kiese Laymon, Hafizah received her BA in English & Economics from Clemson University, and her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery” / Boston Review Contest, recipient of a 2012 Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and a finalist in the Fifth Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, she was a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Finalist from the Poetry Foundation and a finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Patrick Rosal.
Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is working on a novel about coming to America and a full-length nonfiction project about the racial landscapes of loss, grief, and becoming in America.