Aracelis Girmay on Reading Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton

Yekaterina Gyadu

“It was like suddenly this cosmology of Black feminist poets, elders, was — I began to reach for them. I feel like my world actually changed after that.”

Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). For her work she was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. Her books have also been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cave Canem Foundation, among other foundations.