A Year in Reading: Hafizah Augustus Geter
I am a writer and a literary agent, which means between my personal and professional lives, much of my time is spent reading—for work, for research, for pleasure. For me as a writer, reading is essential to my process. My debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin, which came out from Random House September of this year, is a deeply researched hybrid work of nonfiction, cultural and social criticism, and political analysis. To write it, I relied on 300+ texts, many of which have continued to shape how I read in the present. Here are some of the reads from this year that stuck with me.
Like so many, I different ways to object to the unjust conditions that capitalism and a carceral society forces us to struggle through. In nonfiction, , asks us to reconsider what we believe about migration, recasting it as a source of hope and history. by is an illuminating read on the emotional, physical, and cultural ways we understand touch and the science behind it. Two memoirs I loved were ’s , which is a brilliant meditation on how music is not just the soundtrack of our lives, sometimes it’s what carries us through; and ’s which speaks to the multiplicity of meanings behind both having faith and being tested by it.
