Hampshire College

Aracelis Girmay, assistant professor of poetry, received her B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University.

Aracelis Girmay's collage-based picture book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Her first book of poems, Teeth, was published by
 Curbstone Press in 2007, and her second poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia, was published by BOA Editions in October, 2011.
Girmay has taught community writing workshops with young people for the last ten years. During
 this time, she worked with the ACTION Project, a teen arts and social justice program in the Bronx founded by Hampshire College alum Tanya Gallo. Girmay has also taught at Queens College and is currently on the faculty of Drew
 University's low residency M.F.A. program. Most recently her work has centered on metamorphosis in relation to cities and bodies.
Questions she is asking include: How did we arrive here? How is gentrification working? What does this body/city document? What has been built? and what has, seemingly, been erased?
Her current interests in poetry include poetry of the Americas, contemporary African American poetry, and poetry of the "political imagination." She is also deeply interested in the work of the metaphor as trope, invention, socio-cultural record--and as a transformational practice of "seeing" that informs one's understanding of the earth, among other possibilities.

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Professor Girmay will be on sabbatical leave in fall 2013.

Affiliations
School for Interdisciplinary Arts

Recent Courses
IA-0329: ...To holler down the lions in this air: An Advanced Poetry Workshop Rooted in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks (Spring 2013)
IA-0387: Creative Writing Concentrators' Seminar (Spring 2013)
IA-0251: Intermediate Poetry Writing Workshop (Fall 2012)
IA-0255: More Eyes: Methods of Writing the Persona (Fall 2012)