Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & essays. Teeth, her collection of poems, was published by Curbstone Press in June 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Callaloo, & MiPoesias, among other journals. Her collage-based picture book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow & former Watson Fellow. She teaches writing workshops in New York & California.

(That's the official bio, gente, but I think you'll love hearing Aracelis on Aracelis in a recent email I received.)

*****
"I've loved books & the idea of reading since I was little. The story goes "you used to memorize the books & sit & read from memory before you knew how to really read." I used to sleep with my books. I LOVED to read, and then, I used to tell my younger brother stories. My grandmother still has folders of stories I'd write at her house. When I was 13, though, I read The Bluest Eye, I remember thinking: Oh, god, we're allowed to write like that? The way we think? The way people talk? The ways my people talk? Oh, really?

It opened up this door of permission — I didn't know, really, that writing could represent me, not until then. wow, something in the way that I perceived writing & reading changed in me then.

I started sharing my work with other people when I was in college — Writing has always been my lifeline — my way of figuring & making sense & asking questions & maintaining hope, a hope. But it wasn't until college that I realized that I HAD to cultivate this work — that I HAVE to write. It is one of my absolute necessaries. Circulation, breath, communication, memory, wildness, & order.

My mom is Puerto Rican & African American (Georgian) — from Chicago, & my dad's Eritrean, born in Gondar, Ethiopia. Both of them are amazing story-tellers — who tell the stories in very different ways. But, oh! The stories — they are essential — I always had the sense (even when I was very small) that these stories would be the only landscapes in which I'd meet, say, my Great Aunt Tiny, my uncle Samuel, my grandparents, my countries. I knew, too, that the stories were not only important for me & my brother to hear (my sisters weren't born yet), but for my parents to say out loud.

I remember witnessing the powers a story can have on the person telling — the way connections that weren't made before can be made in the telling. I write because it is my way of speaking, my way of figuring, my way of connecting, moving deeper into my life. I write, too, in the words of Carolyn Forche: against forgetting. I write the things that others wish I would forget. The things I cannot bear forgetting. The things I cannot survive forgetting. I write to get something back: world, that is, to still myself, somehow, & consider the things the world is constantly showing: see, see this! hear, hear this! say this! remember, remember! I write to undo time, to go back & fiddle, to sit with what I've been given, to learn something, really, to visit the ghosts & let them know I see them.