Interview #208: How Safia Elhillo Makes Money Writing

Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese-American poet, the author of The January Children and Girls That Never Die, and the co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She has also authored two Young Adult novels in verse, Home Is Not A Country—longlisted for the National Book Award—and Bright Red Fruit. A recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she currently teaches in the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University and Pacific University.

In this interview, Safia breaks down how she structures her income, explaining that her career is funded by speaking engagements and university teaching rather than book royalties. She explains how the Stegner Fellowship bought her the time to draft three books, while her prize money from the Ruth Lilly Fellowship went straight toward uninsured dental work. If you want an unromanticized breakdown of how to build a literary life when every paycheck is a moving target, this one’s for you.

• What you do: I write poetry, give readings and talks and workshops, teach at a few universities, and have written two YA novels in verse. The short answer is that I’m a poet.

• Years writing professionally: Something like 18 years? The first time I was paid for poetry was in the summer of 2008 for facilitating a poetry workshop as part of the DC Youth Slam Team when I was 17, and I’ve been working pretty steadily ever since.

• Earnings range: No two years are the same–last year I made around $70k before taxes, which is on the lower end of that range, and in years where I receive book advances I’ve generally made more. It’s hard to average because the circumstances of my work and my sources of income really vary from year to year.

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These days, I make the majority of my annual income from speaking engagements handled by my agency, Blue Flower Arts. I travel nationally and internationally to give readings and talks and workshops, and to teach at longer sorts of residencies and conferences like Rosemary’s House and Tin House.

In the past year or so I’ve also started to make a significant part of my income via teaching. Before the end of last year, I was not officially associated with an institution--I taught for a semester last year at City College of New York online, a gig I got by meeting a writer at a residency who was about to go on sabbatical.

I was paid ~$5000 for that semester-long course, paid out biweekly via university payroll. I’ve taught a few other semester-long courses in the past, but nothing longform. As of last December, I now teach in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University and will be starting at the low-residency MFA at Pacific University this summer.

Very little of my income at this moment comes directly from the act of writing. In a given year I may have one or two commissions, often from museums, usually $500-$1000 apiece. In the past I’ve also done some freelance editorial work, but I’m not doing that at the moment.

I don’t really get a lot of royalties from my older published works–I get a few hundred dollars annually in royalties from The January Children. That’s the only collection of mine that pays royalties, because I didn’t get an advance for that book, just the $1000 prize for winning the Sillerman (which was treated as prize money, not an advance). But for my YA novels and for Girls That Never Die, I haven’t earned out my advances yet.