Selkie Stories Are for Losers

Sofia Samatar (born October 24, 1971) is an American poet, novelist and educator from Indiana.Samatar was born in 1971 in northern Indiana, United States.Her father was the Somali scholar, historian and writer Said Sheikh Samatar. Her mother is a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota.Sofia's parents met in 1970 in Mogadishu, Somalia, while her mother was teaching English.Samatar attended a Mennonite high school before studying at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English. In 1997, Samatar earned a Master's degree in African languages and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in 2013 in contemporary Arabic literature.She is an Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University. Samatar's first novel A Stranger in Olondria was published in 2013.Samatar has also published qasīdas in English and collaborated with her brother on a book of illustrated prose poems, entitled Monster Portraits, which was published in 2018 by Rose Metal Press. A sequel to A Stranger in Olondria, entitled The Winged Histories, was published by Small Beer Press in 2016.Samatar's main literary influences include: Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as Somali mythology. Samatar served as a nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts.In 2022, she published her first nonfiction book, The White Mosque, a memoir about a trip to Uzbekistan in search of the followers of fringe religious leader Claas Epp Jr.