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Meet Author Hafizah Augustus Geter

in conversation with A.E. Osworth

Join us when author Hafizah Augustus Geter visits to discuss her new memoir, The Black Period with and A.E. Osworth.

About the author:

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American, an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, The Believer, The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In her new memoir, The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.

At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she’d spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.

Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside stunning original artwork created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.

Hafizah Augustus Geter will be in conversation with A.E. Osworth, a transgender novelist and a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. Their debut, We are Watching Eliza Bright, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and long listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and The Tournament of Books. They also have a decade-long career writing nonfiction on the internet, which includes a stint as Geekery Editor for Autostraddle and as a columnist for Catapult. You can also find their work on Guernica, Electric Literature and Quartz, among others.

Books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.