Janklow & Nesbit Associates

Hafizah Geter is an award-winning Nigerian-American poet, writer, and editor born in Zaria, Nigeria. She grew up in Akron, Ohio and Columbia, South Carolina and received her BA in English and economics from Clemson University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago.

Before joining Janklow & Nesbit, Hafizah was most recently an Editor at Little A and Topple Books, where her list included Hari Ziyad’s BLACK BOY OUT OF TIME, Susan Bernhard’s WINTER LOON, William Dameron’s THE LIE: A MEMOIR OF TWO MARRIAGES, CATFISHING & COMING OUT, Precious Brady Davis’s I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ME, Bobi Conn’s THROUGH THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY, Marco Rafalà’s HOW FIRES END, a 2020 Connecticut Book Award finalist and honorable mention, and Melissa Faliveno’s TOMBOYLAND which was named one of New York Public Library and NPR’s Best Books of 2020.

Hafizah is the author of the debut poetry collection UN-AMERICAN from Wesleyan University Press (September 2020), nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image award, and a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her nonfiction debut, THE BLACK PERIOD: ON PERSONHOOD, RACE & ORIGIN, is forthcoming from Random House in fall 2022. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Boston Review, Longreads, Paris Review, and McSweeney’s Indelible in the Hippocampus, among others. Through her writing, editorial work, and advocacy, she has a deep engagement with a number of organizations centered on writing and justice, including VONA/Voices, Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and PEN America, and she has served on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. Hafizah lives with her wife in Brooklyn and currently serves on the Brooklyn Literary Council and as the poetry committee co-chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Literary Interests:

Hafizah is open to submissions of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. Hafizah represents writers who start conversations, challenge conventions, and whose sentences thrum with voice and style. She loves complex thinkers who combine their obsessions with lyric and narrative attention and is interested in stories that reveal something precise and up close about our world and our relationships. She’s interested in stories that complicate the personal with the political, cultural, and/or historical in order to reveal new connections, and fuller ways for us to be human—stories that investigate the intricacies and in-betweens of sexuality, gender, tenderness and cruelty, love and desire, intimacy and shame—and she loves a sad book as much as a funny one.

Hafizah is particularly keen to read stories from marginalized writers, especially African, Muslim, and Indigenous writers, and writers from the South. She is excited by narratives that, regardless of genre, engage with disability justice, environmental justice, or transgender justice, and stories that push against Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, and heteronormativity. She believes, unequivocally, that Black lives matter. Hafizah is in love with stories and is looking to take on writers who feel the same. Hafizah is not currently accepting poetry, YA, or children’s submissions. Twitter: @RhetoricAndThis. www.hafizahgeter.com

Submission Guidelines: https://www.janklowandnesbit.com/submissions