Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2019, and elsewhere, and her essays and articles appear or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, among others. Formerly poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length, she holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD from Emory University. She was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Originally from Massachusetts, she now lives in Michigan, where she is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Learn more at www.sumitachakraborty.com or find her on Twitter at @notsumatra.

“Frank Bidart, from whom Chakraborty’s debut collection Arrow (Alice James Books, 2020) receives both its epigraph and its title, once wrote that “LOVE IS THE DISTANCE / BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE.” It stands to reason that Arrow is a monumental study of distance, a geography of the wound—in other words, a topography of love.” 
—Matilda Lin Berke for The Adroit Journal

“A weapon common to every culture with trees hardy enough to shape a bow, Chakraborty’s lyric arrows prick a reader’s heart with their trajectories of love and death, suture and wound. Arrow is one of those books into which a writer pours everything she knows.”
—Joyce Peserof, Arrowsmith Press

“[Chakraborty] bridges time, loss, and the universe with a tone that is consistently engaging and inviting. It is a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder.”
—The Guardian

"Chakraborty's lyrics open up the subconscious for us so we can gather our entanglements and keep on shooting through the universe."
—Jeevika Verma for NPR

"Chakraborty pushes form to propel the poems beyond expected endings in order to channel her self-reflexive impulse into further aporias. The poems here are animals, living creatures of their own, in that they are relentless, persistent, adaptive, and enduring even in the face of all the patriarchal, human violences around them."
—Gasher Journal

“In poems that focus on gender and race-based violence, environmental destruction, and grief, Chakraborty investigates the unknown, unexpected, and unexplained.”
—Publishers Weekly

"Every line in this ravishing collection is the rib of a generous umbrella, folding and expanding our sense of both what we know and don’t know."

—RHINO Reviews

"About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty’s Arrow, the reader encounters an impossible poem called 'Dear, beloved.' It’s impossible because who could write it? It’s as large, in its way, as any epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things, though it seems, also, diurnal. And it’s impossible also because it’s a highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made."
—Shane A. McCrae

"I stand in awe of Sumita Chakraborty’s visionary collection, by turns epic and compressed in scope, weighty in its tapestry-like materiality and sleekly dynamic as an arrow. The mythic and literary, here, are invigorated by seeming autobiography, which in turn gains collective energy and heft from the poems’ timeless tropes and themes. Seamless and diverse in form, cosmic in subject and image, one feels in the presence of an oracular intelligence and an abiding lyric imagination."
—Diane Seuss

“This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs, brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W. H. Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty’s language, we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings—and even the oldest of human mysteries, like ‘the etymology of love’—are redefined. All one can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo.”
—Ilya Kaminsky