Tag Archive for Hafizah Geter

“Un-American”, “Conjure”, and “The Age of Phillis” Longlisted for 2021 PEN Book Awards

We congratulate Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who are all Longlisted for awards from PEN America.

PEN Open Book Longlist covers

Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection, Un-American, is Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

Geter’s 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.

PEN/Voelcker Award Longlist book covers

We are also pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout’s Conjure and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis are both Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. The PEN/Voelcker Award honors a distinguished collection of poetry that represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers an increasingly toxic world.

The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade.

From PEN America’s press release:

The Longlists for its 2021 Literary Awards span 11 book awards and encompassing more than 125 writers and translators, representing the year’s most extraordinary literary talents. Over 80 judges have selected the Longlists, which are made up of categories including the novel, short story collection, translation, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and more. (Read the full release here.)

Finalists for PEN America Literary Awards will be announced in February 2021.

Announcing “Un-American”

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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 Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace’s Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother’s death and her father’s illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.

“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items—cups, cards, couches—get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can’t, what she needs to hear from her family but won’t. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story.”
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer—poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book.”
Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

“In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter’s poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance.”
Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

HAFIZAH GETER, born in Zaria, Nigeria, is an author and editor whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Wesleyan University Press’ Antiracist Reading Lists!

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To celebrate the continuous struggle for freedom and equality in America, Wesleyan University Press has compiled a few antiracist reading lists in order to amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices, experiences, and histories. Below are just a few of the fantastic titles Wesleyan University Press has published by BIPOC authors or about the Black historical legacy. Poetry, music and dance, autobiography, science fiction, historical novels, and more show the breadth of these lyrical, literary, and scholarly contributions. We are dedicated to supporting Black authors and stories, to listening and learning through publishing and reading. This moment is highlighting just how much work there is to be done in order to dismantle systemic racism in our country; these books help show us why that work is so important and how we can begin to integrate it into our daily lives and reading practices. Black lives matter!

To order books and view our full list of titles, please visit https://www.hfsbooks.com/publishers/wesleyan-university-press/ or click on the below cover images to visit a book page directly. And don’t forget to look out for Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times edited by Christina Baade and Kristin McGee– forthcoming in Spring 2021!

The following list includes poetry, science fiction, historical novels, and non-fiction.

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A Hubert Harrison Reader

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Five Black Lives

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African American Connecticut Explored

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100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof

 

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The Little Edges by Fred Moten

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The Book of Landings by Mark McMorris

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Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

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Un-American by Hafizah Geter

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The Lazarus Poems by Kamau Brathwaite

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Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa

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The Peacock Poems by Sherley Anne Williams

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semiautomatic by Evie Shockley

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In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae

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To See the Earth Before the End of the World by Ed Roberson

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Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha by Ananya Chatterjea

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Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy

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The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins

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The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas

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Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae by Michael E. Veal

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Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse

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Come home Charley Patton by Ralph Lemon

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Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose

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The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory by Anne Farrow

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The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

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How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

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Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor

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In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo

Juneteenth, celebrating freedom

On June 19, 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation was read by General Gordon to Texas, the last state to free enslaved people. Known as Juneteenth, this day marks the official end of slavery in the United States.

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation almost two years before Juneteenth on January 1, 1863. However, at the time it was issued, the proclamation only applied to places under Confederate control, excluding other areas such as border states and rebel areas under Union control. Two years later, all enslaved people were officially freed.

Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday in 1979. Today, it is recognized by many states and celebrated through parades, barbecues, and other outdoor activities.

On this Juneteenth, Wesleyan University Press celebrates old and new publications by black authors exploring the legacy of the black experience in America through poetry, essays, and historical texts. Make sure to check out the below titles to support Black authors on this holiday.