Hafizah Augustus Geter, author portrait
© Beowulf Sheehan

Hafizah Augustus Geter

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. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American, an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, The Believer, 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 Women inPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Black Period

Books

The Black Period

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award Winner of the Lambda Literary Award A New Yorker Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Brittle Paper Notable African Book of the Year Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize Acclaimed poet Hafizah Augustus Geter reclaims her origin story in this “lyrical memoir” (The

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