Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is in progress and under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press, and her second collection of poems is in progress and titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record.

Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, The Offing, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her scholarship has recently appeared in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Modernism/modernity, College Literature, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and elsewhere, and she has published public-facing literary criticism and personal essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Rain Taxi, among others.

In Fall 2024, she will join the Department of English at the University of Virginia as an assistant professor, teaching creative writing and literature courses in poetry and poetics. Before that, she taught at Emory University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (2018-2019); the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (2019-2022), where she was the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry; and North Carolina State University, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of English and won the Outstanding Junior Faculty in the Humanities award (2022-2024). Her courses have been cross-listed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Environmental Studies. In addition to poetry writing workshops across undergraduate and graduate levels, her other recent offerings include undergraduate courses such as “Writing in a Time of Extinction,” “Conversations with Dead People,” “The Personal, The Political, and The Poetic,” and “Unruly Feelings,” which are upper-level literary studies seminars, as well as graduate courses on topics such as “Reading Archives: Gaps, Margins, Erasures,” “Poetry and Research,” “On Failure.”

She received her BA in English and Creative Writing from Wellesley College and her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman fellow, and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK). Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length. More recent editorial work includes serving on the board of Alice James Books (joined in 2021).

The way to her heart is hot sauce.