Mahtem Shiferraw

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Mahtem Shiferraw is the author of three poetry collections: Fuchsia, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets; Your Body Is War; and, most recently, Nomenclatures of Invisibility, published by BOA Editions. Originally from Ethiopia and Eritrea, she now lives in Los Angeles and serves on the WLT editorial board.

  • An abstract image that suggests a map of a big city

    Fire

    March 2025
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Mark Bradford’s Scorched Earth uses a blacked-out map to visually represent the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the 1921 race massacre. This powerful artwork s…
  • A panoramic view of Addis Ababa

    Addis Ababa

    May 2022
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    IF YOU SEE this city for the first time, it may seem as if it has just sprung to life overnight, such is its chaotic charm; it sits atop an elevated earth at three thousand meters a…
  • An expressive painting using frond like fields of color from which a human face emerges

    Introduction

    March 2022
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) There are many things I wish to tell you about the state of African literature today, but none would be able to be contained i…
  • Spray painted words adorn the side of a boarded up building. Text reads: Stop killing black people. Black Lives Matter. No justice. No peace.

    Black Voices 2021: A Series Introduction

    August 25, 2021 Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo by Mahtem Shiferraw When the social uprisings shook the country last summer and reverberated throughout the globe in an astonishingly collapsing wave, we had already been cut a thousand…
  • Spray painted words adorn the side of a boarded up building. Text reads: Stop killing black people. Black Lives Matter. No justice. No peace.

    Black Voices: A Series Introduction

    June 24, 2020 Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo by Mahtem Shiferraw In the aftermath of the senseless deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many others before them, it is difficult to think we can st…
  • A photograph of an empty bench facing the ocean

    This, Too, Is War

    June 15, 2020 Mahtem Shiferraw
    In this letter to a friend, a health-care worker, Mahtem Shiferraw traces the devastating effects of war and how, with Covid-19—this war “that bloomed itself out of nothing, that continued to sh…
  • The cover to Your Body Is War by Mahtem Shiferraw

    Your Body Is War by Mahtem Shiferraw

    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 90 pages. Embattled Representative Ilhan Omar recently said of herself and her fellow freshman congresswomen of color, “We are not there to be quiet. We a…
  • Juxtaposed photos of sand dunes through different color filters

    Six Poems

    May 2018
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo: Meriç Dağlı/UnsplashNomenclatures IIThose which we are givenin the brink of sorrow,or joy – or both;those marked on our foreheadsthe curse of a generation,or more,marked on our abdomensbirthmar…
  • What to Read Now books September 2017

    Selected Works from the African Diaspora

    September 2017
    Mahtem Shiferraw
    This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they…
  • The cover to Fuchsia by Mahtem Shiferraw

    Fuchsia by Mahtem Shiferraw

    Mahtem Shiferraw
    Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 83 pages. The futility of rage in the face of violence is among the many threads running through Fuchsia, winner of the 2016 Sillerman First…