Photo by Kabir Lambo.

zakia henderson-brown is the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, a NYSCA/NYFA Poetry Fellow, and has received additional support from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Callaloo Journal, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Poets House. Her works appear in New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019), Adroit, Beloit Poetry Journal, Epiphany, No, Dear, North American Review, Obsidian, The Offing, and elsewhere. She lives in her native Brooklyn with her family.

"The Body Losing its Borders is a masterclass in precision and form, with poems that call upon the roots of us; yes, ancestral, but also the feral roots, the free, that in us that is at liberty and at large. In this debut, Henderson-Brown weaves elegy, power, a singular wit, and history in language that sears with exactness and surprise. This collection is a rare force and will leave the reader changed."
—Rio Cortez, author of Golden Ax

“Amongst the many things Henderson-Brown has to be proud of here, of all there is to consider, I cannot shake how in these poems she has made grief feel just as much ballet, as it is battle. This is both gunpowder and plié—blood, regardless—and I am changed for having experienced it.”
—Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down

“zakia henderson-brown writes with an undeniable swagger. These poems are thick with grief & yet— & still— sultry & musical. How many poets can write at the intersection of the past and the future while making it sing in a way that makes the present electric? There is only one zakia henderson-brown.“
—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold

“‘The Body Losing Its Borders,’ the title poem, opens with the word ‘before,’ and we are invited into a liminal space. In the hands of zakia henderson-brown, the space is tricky. We go along with the poem's speaker, at once regarding, say, a baby beginning to form words and, a few lines later, in the depths of historic despair. Fury. Grief. Outrage, say, for the murder of Emmett Till. Then we are connected to the speaker's Father. And isn't that how the back-and-forth of time happens? The back-and-forth of the mind? zakia henderson-brown gives us poems that promise plain song and complicated grace. Just what we need in these times of tenacious hope.”
—Kimiko Hahn, Author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems