Aracelis Girmay: Aracelis Girmay's debut poetry collection, Teeth, was published by Curbstone Press and was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems have, most recently, been published in Black Renaissance Noir, Gulf Coast, A Public Space, & Callaloo, among other journals.

A Cave Canem Fellow, she has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Watson Foundation. She is this year’s recipient of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was recently awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Girmay is an Acentos Foundation board member and a contributing editor for The Massachusetts Review. She also writes, occasionally, for ELEM magazine, a lifestyle and arts magazine dedicated to the concerns and interests of the Eritrean community (in Eritrea and the diaspora).

For the past nine years, Girmay has taught community writing workshops in her native California and in New York. She received her MFA from NYU in 2003 and is now on the faculty of both Drew University’s low-residency Poetry MFA program and Hampshire College’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts.

Girmay grew up in Santa Ana, California and currently lives in New York.