Sumita Chakraborty

Sumita Chakraborty earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and a doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. She currently serves as an assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University.

"From the kind of intellectual and artistic angle of things, I think that I’m not excited about anything if it is not surprising and confusing and mystifying to me. I think often of [John] Keats’s idea of negative capability, being able to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason… [A]ll of my work, whether poetry writing or scholarly writing, it all stems out of a question that I genuinely don’t know the answer to, and then I’m writing as a way to try to find my way toward not just an answer, but plural answers and plural stories about whatever it is that’s confusing or mystifying me."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Sumita Chakraborty,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (2020), which won the GLCA New Writers Award. Her first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Her essays have most recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her scholarship has appeared in such journals as Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), and Modernism/modernity.

Chakraborty 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. In 2021, she joined the board of Alice James Books.