Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North Africans.
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Extra Resources
Books and Selected Other Work by Charif Shanahan
POETRY
Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023)
Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017)
Books and Selected Other Work by Safia Elhillo
POETRY
Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022)
The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)
“Indeterminacy” (Poets.org, 2023)
FICTION
Home Is Not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021)
EDITORIAL PROJECTS
ed. with Fatimah Asghar, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019)
Also Referenced
Cave Canem
Mizna
The Ineffable Residence: Safia Elhillo Interviews Charif Shanahan
Moore Lecture Series at Northwestern University
Abdel Halim Hafez
Sudan Cipher
Orpheus & Euridice
Tercet
Ghazal
Sonnet
“Indeterminacy” by Charif Shanahan (chosen by Patricia Smith)
Wallace Stegner Fellowship
Fulbright Fellowship
Eavan Boland
Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford University Press, 2011)
Omar ibn Said
Bios:
Charif Shanahan is the author of Trace Evidence: poems, which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children, Girls That Never Die, and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.
Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD candidate in Black Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. His chapbook Stopgap, won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest and was published in 2019.
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