Episode 117: Charif Shanahan & Safia Elhillo with Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North Africans.

Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North Africans.

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Extra Resources

Books and Selected Other Work by Charif Shanahan

POETRY

Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023)

Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017)

Books and Selected Other Work by Safia Elhillo

POETRY

Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022)

The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)

“Indeterminacy” (Poets.org, 2023)

FICTION

Home Is Not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021)

EDITORIAL PROJECTS

ed. with Fatimah Asghar, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019)

Also Referenced

Cave Canem

Mizna

The Ineffable Residence: Safia Elhillo Interviews Charif Shanahan

Moore Lecture Series at Northwestern University

Abdel Halim Hafez

Sudan Cipher 

Orpheus & Euridice

Tercet

Ghazal

Sonnet

“Indeterminacy” by Charif Shanahan (chosen by Patricia Smith)

Wallace Stegner Fellowship

Fulbright Fellowship

Eavan Boland

Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford University Press, 2011)

Omar ibn Said

Bios:

Charif Shanahan is the author of Trace Evidence: poems, which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children, Girls That Never Die, and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD candidate in Black Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. His chapbook Stopgap, won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest and was published in 2019.

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