Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
HAFIZAH Augustus GETER
Author of
The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, 2022)
Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, forthcoming from Random House on September 20, 2022, and the poetry collection Un-American, which was an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, The Believer, The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katherine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y Women in Power Fellow. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from NYU, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Books by HAFIZAH
The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, 2022)
2023 Lambda Literary Award Winner
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews
A stunningly original and lyrical memoir from an acclaimed poet that crosses continents, grapples with white supremacy, and explores how the origin stories we inherit can be remade.
“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.”
Hafizah Augustus Geter disrupts the myths of America’s origins and contemporary America through her experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, The Black Period follows Hafizah on a journey that tells her at every turn she’s not worthy. At the same time, she manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself. Penetrative and heartening, The Black Period captures a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love despite the lasting effects of white supremacy.
Combining lyrical prose with biting criticism, Hafizah expertly weaves between the micro and macro, from her own experience as the daughter of a Black American visual artist, and a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives, to her days in a small Catholic school, to a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother, to the feelings of joy and community which the Black Lives Matter movement engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, Hafizah addresses the larger systems of inequity that make it difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color to move through the world. The Black Period elegantly maps the untidy work of revision to write a new origin story.
PRAISE
In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful vision of Black life in the United States. . . . She asks, ‘What would it look like to emerge from erasure?’ Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.”—The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2022 So Far”
“Among the most evocative and intellectually dazzling memoirs of recent times.”—Suketu Mehta, author of This Land Is Our Land
“A book of extraordinary ambition, at once bracing, beautiful, and necessary—I couldn’t put it down.”—Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
“In this elegiac text, a Nigerian American poet pays homage to her family while considering Black origin stories. . . . A resonant collage of memories, soulfulness, and elective, electrifying solidarity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Geter’s expansive vision becomes much more than a self-portrait as it confronts how the human body keeps score—and survives. This poetic memoir delivers”—Publishers Weekly
Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
2021 PEN Open Book Finalist
2021 NAACP Image Award Finalist, Poetry
2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, Longlist
Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes--linguistic, cultural, racial, familial--of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.
PRAISE
"Hafizah Geter is the kind of poet I can't do without. She questions how poetry operates in our culture and is unafraid to show us the ugly. She is committed to the public, to the way social imaginaries become real ones. It is unglamorous work and only a few poets do it on the regular, who use the title of "poet" as a vocation, as interrogator of false meritocracies, as a way to distill how racism works in our institutions."—Megan Fernandes, BOMB Magazine
"Geter's vivid debut invokes the pain of familial dislocation, illness, and death, exacerbated by the twin plagues of xenophobia and racism It is this violence, captured in rich, musical language, that command such power."—Publishers Weekly
"In the resulting poems Geter moves through her grief while refusing ideas of whom America belongs to and who belongs in America."—Poets & Writers
"Incisive, devastating poems about what it means to be American, and who gets to be American and who doesn't."—Roxane Gay, bookshop.org