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Hafizah Geter has received widespread literary praise for The Black Period since its release in fall 2022, including a review in The New Yorker magazine: 

“In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful vision of Black life in the United States by intertwining dual origin stories: her own (she is the daughter or an African American man and a Muslim Nigerian woman) and the nation’s, with its history of Native genocide and African enslavement. Recounting the lives of her forebears (enslaved people, sharecroppers, artists), she expresses grief and rage, but she also sees the potential for liberation, which she terms, “the Black Period,” a time both prospective and realized, “where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free.” Again and again, she asks, “What would it look like to emerge from erasure?” Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.”

“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways,” writes Hafizah Geter. The Black Period creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that white America has time and again sought to erase. Geter maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives, her days in a small Catholic school, a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother, and the feelings of joy and community that Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.

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Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is a New Yorker magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, and an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, Boston Review, The Believer, and The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y WomeninPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Geter lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In a career that spans two continents, Tyrone Geter has built an international reputation as a world-class artist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and teacher. Recently retired from his position as an associate professor of art at Benedict College in Columbia, Geter grew up in Anniston, Alabama, during a time defined by strict segregation laws and social injustice. Anniston was a site of numerous acts of racial violence during the Civil Rights Era. The immediacy of these events and an inherited legacy of spiritual strength and fortitude against all the odds inform and shape his work.