About

Safia Elhillo is an award-winning poet who performs regularly and whose writing has been published in various journals and anthologies, the New Daugthers of Africa anthology just being one of the latest one. In 2016, her chapbook Asmarani was included in the New Generation African Poets Box Set. Her debut collection The January Children, was published in 2017 and won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her latest book is the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 3 which she co-edited with Fatimah Asghar.  In this episode, we will talk about Safia’s books, the power of silences in poetry, using different languages in one text, facilitating poetry workshops, the importance of communities and the possibilities of fashion.