GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

A new and intimate poetry collection from award-winning poet Safia Elhillo.

In GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE, Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women's bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.

Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning: "what if I will die" "what will govern me then".

Sudanese by way of D.C., Safia Elhillo is co-editor of the anthology HALAL IF YOU HEAR ME with One World author Fatima Asghar. She is an alumna of The New School's MFA Program, and winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. The recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation, Safia's work has appeared in POETRY magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day series, and she has been featured in NPR, Teen Vogue, Book Riot, WBUR, Essence, The Atlantic, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorlines, Bustle, Ms. Magazine, and BBC. Currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in Oakland, California.