About
For a frequently updated CV, please see Sumita's website.
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: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress.
Her poetry has recently appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere. 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.
