The English Department welcomes poet Sumita Chakraborty ’08 for a reading from her work. April is National Poetry Month, and in collaboration with Mass Poetry, Wellesley is encouraging all members of the community to celebrate the power of poetry to bring people together. This reading is one of several events taking place on campus.

Sumita Chakraborty ’08 is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, at Emory University.

Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry 2019; her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books; her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in 2008 with a degree in English and Creative Writing and went on to receive her doctorate in English with a certificate in WGSS from Emory University in 2018. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and in 2018, her poem “And death demands a labor” was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK). She is poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length.

She is working on a scholarly book project titled The Poetics of Ethics in the Anthropocene. Her first book of poems, Arrow, is forthcoming in September 2020.