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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 Poetry, Kenyon 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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