Your Body Is War

Mahtem Shiferraw is an Ethiopian-Eritrean American poet and fiction writer who grew up between Ethiopia and Eritrea before immigrating to the United States. Her debut collection, Fuchsia (TriQuarterly Books, 2016), won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and meditates on memory, the body, displacement, and the complexities of diasporic womanhood. Her second collection, Your Body Is War (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), extends these themes with attention to violence, survival, and ancestral inheritance. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner and Callaloo. Drawing on oral and visual traditions of the Horn of Africa, Shiferraw's work occupies an important place in contemporary African American poetry.