An agent, an expert editor, and a fierce advocate, Hafizah Geter got her first job in literature over a decade ago with the literary nonprofit Cave Canem, before moving on to organizations like PEN America and Poets House in NYC. Before joining Janklow & Nesbit in 2020, she was an editor at Little A and Joey Soloway’s Topple Books where she worked on award winning fiction and nonfiction, including New York Public Library and NPR Best Books of the Year. Hafizah represents a wide array of nonfiction and literary and commercial fiction. In search of great writers and thinkers, she is eager to work with experts in their field.

In nonfiction, Hafizah is particularly interested in big-idea books that start conversations, challenge conventions, and reveal something precise about society or relationships. She is keen on books that examine technology, race, disability, queerness, inequality, science, politics, as well as cultural histories and close studies (salt, rain, mushrooms, tears, etc.).

In fiction, Hafizah is keen on a broad range of literary and commercial fiction that reveal new connections, and fuller ways for us to be human. She loves a sad book as much as a contemplative or funny one. Above all, she seeks writers whose sentences thrum with voice and style.

Hafizah was born in Zaria, Nigeria and grew up in Akron, Ohio and Columbia, South Carolina. She received her BA in English and economics from Clemson University, an MFA in nonfiction from NYU, and an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House) is a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, and an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick. Her poetry collection, Un-American (Wesleyan University Press), was a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a 2021 PEN Open Book Award finalist, and longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.

Currently, Hafizah is eager to receive nonfiction in the realm of reportage/journalism, big-ideas, economics, labor, abolition, science, tech/social media culture, cultural criticism, social and political sciences, prescriptive nonfiction, and nature writing.

Hafizah is not accepting poetry, YA, or children’s submissions. Twitter: @RhetoricAndThis. www.hafizahgeter.com