This week on the PEN Atlas, Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo shares two new poems and comments on the complex relationship between language, identity, family and the concept of home when living in the diaspora.

Read ‘Talking about home’ here.

Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. A Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Kinfolks Quarterly: a journal of black expression, she received an MFA in poetry from the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee and joint winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Her work appears in several publications and in the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Again I Wait For This to Pull Apart.