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Safiya Sinclair

“I decided that my responsibility as a poet was to always keep my gaze centered on my Jamaican landscape, to tell the stories of Jamaican womanhood, of blackness and marginalization, to write against postcolonial history and nurture anti-colonial selfhood.”

National Book Critic’s Circle Award Winner

Whiting Award Winner

American academy of arts and letters award

OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry

 

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How to Say Babylon is one of the most gut-wrenching, soul-stirring, electrifying memoirs I’ve ever read. It shatters every perception we have about Rastafari and lays bare our post-colonial wounds as Jamaicans with lyrical power, unflinching truth, and grace. A necessary testament filled with rich, poetic detail that haunts and dazzles.
— Nicole Dennis-Benn
Brilliant...a tour de force.
Washington Post
How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets. For its sheer lusciousness of prose, the book’s a banquet.
New York Times Book Review
Sinclair recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir…. In dazzling prose … she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon…. Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force.
Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
With exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed.
— Ada Limón
Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience.
Booklist starred review
A stunning debut collection.
Publishers Weekly starred review

Safiya Sinclair is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which the New York Times Book Review, in a front page review, called “scorching,” and Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called a “tour de force.” The memoir is also a Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick. How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of Sinclair’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Her first book is the award-winning collection of poetry, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. It was selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year," was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. 

Sinclair's work is deeply engaged with womanhood, with exile (exile from the homeland, from the prevailing culture, from one’s own body), and with reclaiming a place in the world. Discussing her poetry with The Rumpus, Sinclair notes, "I wanted to write poems that reflected the fertile landscape of Jamaica as a mirror to the landscape of the black female body—untamed, ‘frightening,’ and unknown, while celebrating the nature of that ‘savagery’ as a vital and beautiful part of Caribbean selfhood."

Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in PoetryKenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere.  

Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, and her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Sinclair is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

 

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