About
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Arrow, was released in September 2020 with Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom, and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is in progress and under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press.
Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her essays most frequently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship has appeared in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, and College Literature, among other venues. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, at Emory University.
She received her BA from Wellesley College and her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; in 2018, her poem “And death demands a labor” was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK); in 2020, she became a Kundiman Fellow (deferred to 2021 due to COVID-19). Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length. Her website contains further information.
