The Body Family is a song of memory and revelation; it is the sublime unearthing of what has been hidden by silence and erasure. This lyrical and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement. 

Speakers:

Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and a forthcoming novel in verse (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). Co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. A 2021 Whiting Award winner, she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center.