A poet and a scholar, Sumita Chakraborty has received praise from The New York Times for poems described as “full of life and joy even when she is thinking through violence and grief.” As a scholar, she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in the relationship between poetics and ethics. 

Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow [Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020]. She is currently working on a scholarly book project titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene (under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press) and a second poetry collection, titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series, and elsewhere. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Modernism/modernity, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias, among other journals. She has received fellowships, honors and residencies from the Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, the Forward Arts Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

Chakraborty holds a Ph.D. in English with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory University and a B.A. in English and creative writing from Wellesley College. Before coming to the University of Virginia, she taught at Emory as a visiting assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry and at North Carolina State University, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of English and won the Outstanding Junior Faculty in the Humanities award.

Chakraborty will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and poetics.