Aracelis Girmay's debut poetry collection, Teeth, was published by Curbstone Press and was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems have been published in Black Renaissance Noir, Gulf Coast, A Public Space, and 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 received her MFA from NYU in 2003 and is now on the faculty of both Drew University's Poetry MFA program and Hampshire College's School of Interdisciplinary Arts. Girmay grew up in Santa Ana, California and currently lives in New York, New York.

Books by Aracelis Girmay:

Other poems on the web by Aracelis Girmay:
"Elegy"
Five poems
"All Day Long the Birds Shout Phebus! Phebus!"

About Kingdom Animalia:

"In Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay achieves a Musical Composition, a beautiful evocation of the bittersweet complexities of the human heart and a treatise on the ever evolving journey to understanding and transcendence."
—Chris Abani

"Some say poetry is about the lines. Some say poetry is about the voice. Some say it's all about the images, concrete or complex. Or the fantasy, or the dream, or the reality, or hope, rage, or bravery, the calling out, the naming. Sure. But don't forget birth, and death, and the fragile beauty in-between, documented as it is here, with tortuous longing, by the unbelievably talented Aracelis Girmay."
—Dagoberto Gilb

"Channeled and composed with breathtaking poetry range, Kingdom Animalia enters the exquisite beauty of being alive and its sister, the terrible ache of loss. Here is a cosmic dialogue between the body and a universe. A universe of grandfathers and grandmothers, of seasons and storms, of brothers and lovers, of snails and dogs. Here is a fable, a self-portrait, and a book reminding us of our instinct to transform, to move and to move on. In gorgeously clear and honest language, Aracelis Girmay explores the human geography of time and origin. These poems resonate with the complexity of separation, forced or voluntary, born of hunger, war, and dream. Come listen to the whispering bodies departing and returning; witness a daughter resilient in the night rain; behold the rain singing si, si, si."
—Ruth Irupe Sanabria