Safia Elhillo author page

Safia Elhillo biography

Safia Elhillo is a poet and author of poetry collections and novels in verse for young adults. Her first poetry collection, The January Children, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017 after winning the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. The collection later received the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award at the 2018 Arab American Book Awards. Elhillo has also held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Her first young adult novel in verse, Home Is Not a Country, was published by Make Me a World, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, in 2021. It follows Nima, a teenager struggling with questions of family, identity, belonging, and the life she imagines she might have lived under the name her parents originally intended to give her. The novel was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and became a 2022 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book. It also won the Children’s/Young Adult category of the 2022 Arab American Book Awards.

Elhillo’s other poetry includes Girls That Never Die, published by One World in 2022. She co-edited the 2019 anthology Halal If You Hear Me with poet Fatimah Asghar.

Her second YA novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit, was published by Make Me a World in 2024. The story centers on Samira, a teenage poet in Washington, DC, whose involvement with an older poet she meets online develops into a troubling relationship while she navigates family expectations, friendship, reputation, and her own artistic ambitions. Bright Red Fruit was named a 2025 Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association.