Safia Elhillo is an author of poetry in both the written and spoken word formats. She was born in Rockville, Maryland to parents who immigrated to the United States from Sudan. Growing up, Elhillo noted that she had difficulties with her self-identity in a large part due to the way people use their nationality to self-identify. With her parents having been born in one country and her in another, this caused some difficulty for her. While she had a desire to feel like she was definitively from one place enough to feel patriotic to it, this was not the case. Elhillo observed that with the enhancement of technology, the idea of community has begun to change. While people may physically be separated by borders, the internet has allowed for these people to connect with one another like never before. People can communicate with anyone around the world instantaneously, allowing for beliefs and ideas to be shared in a way that has never existed before, fostering a new idea of community that does not focus on the geographical location of the individuals. The fact that there is such a large number of displaced people living throughout the world right now has only emphasized Elhillo’s belief that our system of identifying people by their nationality or current geographic location does not apply like it used to, as it alienates all of these people. For a long time she felt like she was never enough to belong to any of these traditional communities, such as not being Sudanese or American enough as well as not Arab or black enough. She eventually came to the realization that by feeling this way about herself, she was in turn inferring this about everyone in the Sudanese American population and other similarly multinational people. This has caused her thinking to shift to honoring these differences and the intersections that exist between separate communities and redefining how she identifies individuals. This thinking has been a large influence in her works, including her collection The January Children (2017), which was awarded a 2018 Arab American Book Award, being the first Sudanese American author to have received the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award. She has performed her work all over the globe, has been published in numerous anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, and has won several awards and fellowships including the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.

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