Poetry
Aracelis Girmay is an award-winning poet who makes work across genres. Her most recent collection, The Black Maria, an elegiac investigation of African diasporic histories in relation to the sea, was named a “Top Poetry Pick” by Publisher’s Weekly, O Magazine and Library Journal. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation and Cave Canem, and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
In collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica, she has also published the chapbook and was a flower, an essayistic ceremony on the imaginative strategies of her foremothers, and is a member of the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. Girmay was born and raised in Southern California and spent most of her adult life in New York. She now lives with her family in the East Bay and teaches poetry at Stanford.