Just Bust! is Madison’s longest-running all-ages open mic and is free and open to the public. All art forms and all experience levels are welcomed and encouraged. Just Bust! will be held on Friday, February 4 from 8 – 10 PM at the Memorial Union Play Circle.
This month’s feature, Safia Elhillo, is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and the novel in verse Home is not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia 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 her commissions include Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland.
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