Sumita Chakraborty
(c) Ashley Chupp
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Arrow (Alice James Books, 2020) was praised in the New York Times as an “allusive and witty debut.” Her first scholarly book, tentatively titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, 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.
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.
Writing about how the poems in Arrow came to be, Chakraborty notes: “What I knew I wanted to write was a book that lives in the aftermath of several forms of violence that have shaped my life and the lives of those I love. But it had to be an “aftermath” that also recognized that there is no “after” violence—it’s never left behind, and there’s always more in store in the present and the future for ourselves and others. Even the violence that is in the past is never “before”: our bodies remember it and our minds rehearse it.”
She is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she received her BA, and she received her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.
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(c) Ashley Chupp
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