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).
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...