The 2025 Bauder Lecture, featuring Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo, distinguished, bestselling author of Bright Red Fruit, delivers the keynote at the 5th annual Bauder Lecture. In this gripping novel in verse, teenager Samira is determined to spend her summer exploring DC and growing as a poet—but a scandalous rumor leaves her grounded and vulnerable. Seeking solace online, she’s drawn into a secret relationship with an older poet that threatens her reputation, her community ties, and her dreams. Bright Red Fruit is a powerful coming-of-age story about navigating desire, family expectations, and the search for self. Following her address, Elhillo will be joined by celeste doaks—editor, journalist, and author of Cornrows and Cornfields — for an in-depth conversation. 

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of the books The January Children, Girls That Never Die, Home Is Not A Country, and Bright Red Fruit. Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. 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. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

celeste doaks is the author of "Cornrows and Cornfields", and editor of the poetry anthology "Not Without Our Laughter". Her chapbook, "American Herstory", was Backbone Press’s first-place winner in 2018. "Herstory" contains poems—which have been featured at the Whitney Museum of American art, Brooklyn Museum, and most recently the Smithsonian American Art Museum— about the artwork former First Lady Michelle Obama chose for the White House. Doaks is a Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (CAAWC) member and has received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Atlantic Center of the Arts, Community of Writers Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Doaks is a three-time Pushcart award nominee and a creative writing professor for over a decade. Her poems, reviews, and cultural essays have appeared in multiple US and UK on-line and print publications including "Ms. Magazine", "The Rumpus", "The Millions", "Huffington Post", "Chicago Quarterly Review", "Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora", "The Hopkins Review, Bmore Art Magazine", "Asheville Poetry Review" and many others.  

The Bauder Lecture at Howard Community College is made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Lillian Bauder, a community leader and Columbia resident. The series is presented in partnership with HCC and HoCoPoLitSo.  

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