Aracelis Girmay was born in California and lives and teaches in New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and the black maria. She is also the author/collagist of the picture book changing, changing and with her sister collaborated on the picture book, What Do You Know? Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and recently edited How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Girmay is currently the Editor-at-Large for BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections and is also the editor of the forthcoming So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth. Her poems and essays have been published in Astra, The Paris Review, Granta, Black Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.