Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers' Award, tthe OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair's other honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. She is writing a memoir of chronicling her life growing up in Jamaica.
Acknowledgments
I.
Home
Pocomania
In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing
Fisherman’s Daughter
Hands
Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda
Mermaid
Catacombs
Dreaming in Foreign
Family Portrait
I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess
Autobiography
Osteology
After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, I
II.
Notes on the State of Virginia, I
America the Beautiful
Another White Christmas in Virginia
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, I
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, II
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, III
Notes on the State of Virginia, II
White Apocrypha
Notes on the State of Virginia, III
Notes on the State of Virginia, IV
Elocution Lessons with Ms. Silverstone
Notes on the State of Virginia, V
Litany for Charlottesville
Notes on the State of Virginia, VI
III.
Prayer Book for Vanishing
Confessor
Omen
Good Hair
Woman, Wound
Woman, 26, Remains Optimistic as Body Turns to Stone
How to Be an Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess
Birthmark, or Purifying at the Sink
Little Red Plum
Center of the World
IV.
After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, II (Laika)
Spectre
Chimera
How to Excise a Tumor
Incorrigible
August Ghost
A Separation
In the Event of the Last Unhappiness, Return to the Sea
August in the Country of Another
Kingdom-come
The Art of Unselfing
Doubt
V.
Crania Americana
Notes
