Congratulations to Safiya Sinclair on her Guggenheim fellowship!

The Guggenheim Fellowship is a prestigious award given to individuals who demonstrate exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or superior creative ability in the arts and exhibit great promise for their future endeavors. Out of 3,000 applications reviewed by the Foundation, approximately 175 fellowships are awarded each year. Applications go through several stages of rigorous scrutiny and review before being awarded the fellowship, making those who receive the award undoubtedly worthy of massive praise. Sinclair was awarded a Fellowship in poetry.

I’m truly honoured to be awarded a 2024 Guggenheim fellowship, alongside so many of my literary heroes! All my immense gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation, and a huge congrats to the other amazing fellows in this class! New poems soon to come! 🌊✨

—Safiya Sinclair on Instagram

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, 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. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Sinclair is the author of Cannibal which was a winner of The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by Nebraska in 2016.

About Cannibal:
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems. 

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To learn more about the Guggenheim Fellowship and to find the list of 2024 fellows click here.