THE BLACK PERIOD

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.

“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

“I say, ‘the Black Period,' and mean ‘home' in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.

At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.

Recalling her parents' lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside 70+ stunning original artworks created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah 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 the 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.

A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.


Hafizah Geter is an award-winning Nigerian-American poet, writer, and editor. In November 2020 she joined Janklow & Nesbit as a literary agent where she co-agents with PJ Mark. Hafizah's debut poetry collection UN-AMERICAN was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and received a Starred Review from Publisher's Weekly. Hafizah's poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Boston Review, Longreads, Yale Review and McSweeney's Indelible in the Hippocampus, among others. She is a Cave Canem poetry fellow, a VONA/Voices nonfiction fellow, a Bread Loaf 2021 Katherine Bakeless nonfiction
fellow, a 2018 92Y Women in Power Fellow, and the recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her wife.