Aracelis Girmay – författare

What Do You Know? is an introspective, poetic picture book about the acts of questioning and listening. Asked by Love itself, the questions wonder aloud, seeking the knowing of an array of very different, yet interconnected, entities and beings. Instead of pointing and naming, here the asker seeks to know the world by listening to it. Tell me, land, farmer, well, rock, fruit bat, courage––what do you know? Across these pages, children will wonder at what we can learn, when we open ourselves up to listening to the world.

A stirring story of African diaspora, resourcefulness, and intergenerational love by National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and renowned poet Aracelis Girmay, and acclaimed illustrator Diana Ejaita.One of Maria Popova's Marginalian Favorites of 2024!A Best Book of 2024, Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature!An Academy of American Poets Featured Fall Book for Young Readers!One of PW’s “12 Children’s Books by Black Authors to Read in 2024!”A Bookstagang Best of 2024 Picture Book Selection, for Best Illustration!One day, young Kamau and his grandmother ZuZu wake up to find themselves on the moon. Kamau doesn’t remember Back Home, but Grandma ZuZu does, and she misses it terribly. Together, through cloth scraps and dance, letters and song, Kamau and ZuZu find a way to make a new life for themselves in this strange land: a new life which is not only rooted in the stories, memories, and traditions that ZuZu always carries with her, but which also lovingly reaches out across the vast expanse of space to connect and communicate with the family from which they’ve been separated. Acclaimed poet Aracelis Girmay and illustrator Diana Ejaita together weave a powerful story inspired by the African diaspora, in which—despite the shock of being uprooted into this alien world, without being given any choice or explanation, and the sorrow that comes from the unfathomable distance separating them from their beloved community—Kamau and ZuZu find a way to live, as people do.

In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy. Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse—a tool and companion—for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love.In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.

In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy. Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse—a tool and companion—for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love.In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.

Praise for Aracelis Girmay: "[Girmay's] every loss--she calls them estrangements--is a yearning for connection across time and place; her every fragment is a bulwark against ruin." --O, The Oprah Magazine Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better."to the sea" great storage house, history on which we rode, we touched the brief pulse of your fluttering pages, spelled with salt & life, your rage, your indifference your gentleness washing our feet, all of you going on whether or not we live, to you we bring our carnations yellow & pink, how they float like bright sentences atop your memory's dark hair Aracelis Girmay is the author of three poetry collections, the black maria; Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award; and Teeth. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.

Winner of the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for PoetryShort-listed for the 2026 Griffin Poetry PrizeWritten over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural — flowers, speech — to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “— i am learning to lift — my voice — like a flower — in — a field of flowers —” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.