Safiya Sinclair
“I decided that my responsibility as a poet was to always keep my gaze centered on my Jamaican landscape, to tell the stories of Jamaican womanhood, of blackness and marginalization, to write against postcolonial history and nurture anti-colonial selfhood.”
“How to Say Babylon is one of the most gut-wrenching, soul-stirring, electrifying memoirs I’ve ever read. It shatters every perception we have about Rastafari and lays bare our post-colonial wounds as Jamaicans with lyrical power, unflinching truth, and grace. A necessary testament filled with rich, poetic detail that haunts and dazzles.”
“Brilliant...a tour de force.”
“How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets. For its sheer lusciousness of prose, the book’s a banquet. ”
“Sinclair recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir…. In dazzling prose … she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon…. Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force.”
“With exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed.”
“Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience.”
“A stunning debut collection.”
Safiya Sinclair is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster, 2023), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. How to Say Babylon was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times, a Top 10 Book of 2023 by the Washington Post, one of The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023, a TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2023, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023. It was also named an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and Barnes & Noble, among others.
Her first book is the poetry collection 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 also an ALA Notable Book of the Year, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and 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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