Safiya Sinclair is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon (2023), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, a finalist the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The memoir is also a Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick. Her first book is the award-winning poetry collection Cannibal (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 other honors include a 2024 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, 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 Ph.D. 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.

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan

“A radiant story of family and self-discovery told through the sharp eye of a talented poet.”
–Booklist 

“An essential memoir. This book is lit from the inside by Sinclair’s determination to learn and live freely, and to see her beloveds freed, too.”
— Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend