Sumita Chakraborty
Poet, essayist, and scholar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sumita Chakraborty is an Indian American poet and academic.[1] She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books, 2020), which won the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry in 2022. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia.[2][3][4]
Sumita Chakraborty | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Poet, academic |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable works | Arrow |
| Notable awards | Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship (2017) GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry (2022) |
Education and career
Chakraborty earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in English from Emory University.[5] Before joining the University of Virginia, she taught at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting professor in Poetry, and at North Carolina State University as an assistant professor of English.[5]
In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.[6] She has also served as poetry editor of AGNI (magazine) and art editor of At Length.[6]
In a 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chakraborty said she was working on her first scholarly book, then titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene.[7]
Arrow
Chakraborty's debut poetry collection, Arrow, was published in 2020 by Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom.[8][9][10]
Reception
In a 2020 review for NCPR, Jeevika Verma wrote that Arrow "creates magic out of what hurts us most" and identified the long poem "Dear, Beloved" as central to the collection.[11] Reviewing the collection in The Journal, Maya McOmie wrote that it centers on the death of the poet's sister.[12] Writing for The New York Times, Elisa Gabbert called Arrow an "allusive and witty debut" and wrote that Chakraborty's poems are "full of life and joy" even as they "defy easy notions of aboutness".[13]
Awards and honors
- Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, 2017[6]
- Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for "And death demands a labor", 2018[14]
- Arrow was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry, 2020[10]
- Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection for Arrow, 2021[15]
- Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Arrow, 2022[16]