Hana Shafi

Hana Shafi is a writer and an illustrator who uses the name Frizz Kid for her visual work. Born in Dubai, Shafi immigrated with her Indo-Iranian family to Canada in 1996 and settled in Mississauga, Ontario. Shafi is a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Journalism Program. In the fall of 2020 Book*hug published her collection of essays, Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World that are built around 30 affirmation artworks that she created and first shared on Instagram.

Poetry

It Begins With the Body: Poems & Illustrations

Toronto: Book*hug, 2018.
PS8637 .H345 I83 2018

Publisher’s Synopsis

It Begins With The Body by Hana Shafi explores the milestones and hurdles of a brown girl coming into her own. Shafi’s poems display a raw and frank intimacy and address anxiety, unemployment, heartbreak, relationships, identity, and faith.

Accompanied by Shafi’s candid illustrations that share the same delightful mixture of grotesque and humour found in her poems, It Begins With The Body navigates the highs and lows of youth. It is about feeling like an outsider, and reconciling with pain and awkwardness. It’s about arguing with your mum about wanting to wax off your unibrow to the first time you threw up in a bar in your twenties, and everything in between. Funny and raw, personal and honest, Shafi’s exciting debut is about finding the right words you wished you had found when you needed them the most.