HAFIZAH AUGUSTUS GETER

AWARD-WINNING POET + AUTHOR

Hafizah Augustus Geter’s bio

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) won the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction in addition to being a 2023 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, and an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick. Kiese Laymon writes, "The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin is an absolutely stunning literary experience. If our creases could croon and our aches could wail, The Black Period is what it might sound like. Hafizah Augustus Geter has written a classic." 

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), nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and which received a Starred Review from Publisher's Weekly. Roxane Gay calls the poems "incisive" and "devastating." Claudia Rankine calls UN-AMERICAN a "gorgeous debut" that "troubles and reshapes notions of belonging." 

Hafizah’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Salon, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, Paris Review, Longreads, Roxane Gay's GAY Magazine, Yale Review,  Tin House, Boston Review, McSweeney’s Indelible in the Hippocampus, among others. Her essay in BOMB Magazine, was a 2022 Best American Essays Notable Essay.

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, and the recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers.

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 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 her second nonfiction project, BEING AROUND, and BERMUDA, a novel about longing, migration, and borders.

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books by Hafizah Augustus Geter

Hafizah Augustus Geter in the media

Recent Articles Featuring Hafizah Augustus Geter:

• Hafizah Geter: Why Writing Isn’t Solitary | Literary Hub

• A World Where Blackness Is a World of Possibility | Electric Literature

• ANNOUNCING THE 2023 PEN AMERICA LITERARY AWARDS WINNERS | Pen America

• Black Phenomena: On Afropessimism & Camp | BOMB Magazine

Podcasts Featuring Hafizah Augustus Geter: