Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, 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.

Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her essays most frequently 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.

Sumita is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Previously, she held the positions of Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her courses have been cross-listed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Environmental Studies; 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,” and the Thesis Workshop in Poetry.

She is a proud alumna 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 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. Current or more recent editorial work includes reading for the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and curating the May 2021 selections for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, as well as serving on the board of Alice James Books (joined in 2021).

She is an Aries sun, a Virgo moon, and a Cancer rising, which she hears is a somewhat bizarre combination.