Hampshire College

Assistant Professor of Poetry

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, & her second poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia, is slated for publication 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 & social justice program in the Bronx founded by Hampshire College alum Tanya Gallo. Girmay has also taught at Queens College & 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 & 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? & what has, seemingly, been erased? Her current interests in poetry include poetry of the Americas, contemporary African American poetry, & poetry of the "political imagination." She is also deeply interested in the work of the metaphor as trope, invention, socio-cultural record--& as a transformational practice of "seeing" that informs one's understanding of the earth, among other possibilities. 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 both literary trope and document--and as a transformational practice of "seeing" that informs one's understanding of the earth, among other possibilities.

Affiliations
School for Interdisciplinary Arts

Recent Courses
IA-0270: Poetry and Political Imagination (Spring 2012)
IA-0265: The Axe and the Sewing Machine: Methods of RE-membering (as Activism)in the Face of Dismemberment (Spring 2012)
IA-0179: Plate by Plate: A Poem's Tectonics (Fall 2011)
IA-0351: Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop (Fall 2011)