Mahtem Shiferraw

Mahtem Shiferraw won the 2015 Sillerman Prize for African Poets. Her collections Fuchsia and Your Body Is War were published by the University of Nebraska Press (see WLT, Nov. 2016, 87, and WLT, Summer 2019, 80). She is the founder of Anaphora Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization that advocates for writers and artists of color. Her new collection, Nomenclatures of Invisibility, is forthcoming from BOA Editions (2023).

  • A panoramic view of Addis Ababa
    May 2022
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    IF YOU SEE this city for the first time, it may seem as if it has just sprung to life overnight, such is its chaotic charm; it sits atop an elevated earth at three thousand meters ab...
  • An expressive painting using frond like fields of color from which a human face emerges
    March 2022
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) There are many things I wish to tell you about the state of African literature today, but none would be able to be contained in a single...
  • Spray painted words adorn the side of a boarded up building. Text reads: Stop killing black people. Black Lives Matter. No justice. No peace.
    August 25, 2021 | Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo by Mahtem Shiferraw When the social uprisings shook the country last summer and reverberated throughout the globe in an astonishingly collapsing wave, we had already been cut a thousand...
  • Spray painted words adorn the side of a boarded up building. Text reads: Stop killing black people. Black Lives Matter. No justice. No peace.
    June 24, 2020 | Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo by Mahtem Shiferraw In the aftermath of the senseless deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many others before them, it is difficult to think we can sti...
  • A photograph of an empty bench facing the ocean
    June 15, 2020 | Mahtem Shiferraw
    In this letter to a friend, a health-care worker, Mahtem Shiferraw traces the devastating effects of war and how, with Covid-19—this war “that bloomed itself out of nothing, that continued to sha...
  • The cover to Your Body Is War by Mahtem Shiferraw
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 90 pages. Embattled Representative Ilhan Omar recently said of herself and her fellow freshman congresswomen of color, “We are not there to be quiet. We ar...
  • Juxtaposed photos of sand dunes through different color filters
    May 2018
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo: Meriç Dağlı/Unsplash Nomenclatures II Those which we are givenin the brink of sorrow,or joy – or both; those marked on our foreheadsthe curse of a generation,or more, marked on our abdomensbi...
  • What to Read Now books September 2017
    September 2017
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they...
  • The cover to Fuchsia by Mahtem Shiferraw
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 83 pages.  The futility of rage in the face of violence is among the many threads running through Fuchsia, winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book...

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