Safiya Sinclair is a highly acclaimed author, born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the oldest of four children, with a brother and two sisters, and her father is a reggae musician and a devout Rasta man. Sinclair has received numerous prestigious awards for her writing, including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship.
Sinclair has published her work in several esteemed literary journals and magazines, including Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. In addition to her accomplishments in poetry, Sinclair has also ventured into memoir writing, with her book "How to Say Babylon" set to be published by Simon and Schuster in October 2023.
Sinclair's debut poetry collection, "Cannibal," was a critical success, earning her numerous awards and accolades. The book won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. It was also recognized as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Sinclair's other honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and more. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.