Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House), and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). With Fatimah Asghar, she is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Ladin Awad is an artist, curator and creative producer based in NYC. Raised in the Bay Area by way of Sudan, her work seeks to abstract the narratives and histories through which cross-cultural Black diasporic life is viewed and understood. Through a multidisciplinary practice, she charts the multidimensionality of Blackness, while exploring expansions and interventions on our collective relationships to movement, memory, and time. Her work is concerned with image making modalities that center interiority, subjectivity and world-making, especially as it relates to Black feminist pedagogies. Ladin received her BA from The New School in Global Studies and her Masters in Art and Public Policy from New York University. She is one of three founding members of of CHROMA, a cultural agency and creative studio that centers the work and perspectives of WOC.

Romaissaa Benzizoune is a writer and editor from New York City and from-from Morocco. Her work has appeared in outlets including McSweeney’s, Teen Vogue, The Observer and The New York Times. She also writes a Substack column called One Thing, and is occasionally funny on Twitter @_asap_ro.

Samah Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian poet, editor and translator who resides in Tiohtià:ke—Montreal. She was a guest speaker for Black Lens on Palestine and performed poetry at the Global Indigenous Solidarities event organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. Her words can be read in FIYAH, the Institute for Palestine Studies, Skin Deep, Mizna, and more.

Umniya Najeer aims to cultivate a Black femme materialist philosophy of history to think through biological reproduction and biological futurity, mothering and maternal refusal, erotics and processes of sexualization, rape culture and paradigms of consent, and objecthood and anthropocentrism, to name a new. While her work is first and foremost rooted in Black feminist theory, Umniya draws on new materialist philosophies, queer of color critique, history of science and performance theory to chart linkages between biological reproduction, race, the nation state, and modern concepts of the subject, liberty, and freedom. Her dissertation centers the lives, bodies, and material objects of Black women through history to theorize everything from enslaved women’s acts of infanticide to the torture devices used to punish such acts of reproductive autonomy. Umniya is also Cave Canem fellow whose first cycle of poetry, Armeika, was published in 2018 by Akashic Books as part of the New-Generation African Poets series.

Welcome to Mizna: The Black SWANA playlist! Take a musical journey through the songs and sounds that inspired our Takeover team and the contributors in the issue. Curated by copy editor Samah Fadil.

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