Commonplace Podcast Episode 124: Reading Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is winner of the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, winner of a 2023 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick, and a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize.
Called "one of 2020's buzziest poets" by Marie Claire, Hafizah is also the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American from Wesleyan University Press (September 2020), received a Starred Review from Publisher's Weekly. It was nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.
Hafizah’s writing has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, Academy of American Poet's Poem-A-Day, The Funambulist, Salon, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, Paris Review, Longreads, Roxane Gay's GAY Magazine, Yale Review, Tin House, Boston Review, among others.
Hafizah serves on the Brooklyn Literary Council and as the poetry committee co-chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival. She is a Cave Canem poetry fellow, a VONA/Voices nonfiction fellow, a Bread Loaf 2021 Katherine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a 2018 92Y Women in Power Fellow, a 2024 Civitella Fellow, and the recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers.
Hafizah has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago, FIT, NYU's Writers in New York program, and in the MFA programs at Manhattanville College and Columbia University. She's previously worked at Cave Canem, Poets House, and PEN America, and served on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. Hafizah holds a BA in English and economics from Clemson University; an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago; and an MFA in nonfiction from New York University where she was an Axinn Fellow in Creative Narrative Nonfiction.
Hafizah is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit where she represents a diverse range of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction writers. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York where she is at work on several projects including WOMEN & WEATHER, as well as her second nonfiction project, BEING AROUND: ON LIVING, and a novel about supercontinents and migration.
Books by Hafizah Geter
Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
Also Referenced:
Diving into the Wreck writing workshop with Sarah Dohrmann
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land
Meander Spiral Explode by Jane Alison
Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences by Mary L. Dudziak
Hafizah Geter on Jean Valentine
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
Wave: A Memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala
The Case Against the Trauma Plot - New Yorker Article by Parul Sehgal