Kingdom Animalia
Aracelis Girmay anouced as winner of the 2015 Whiting Award: "[Girmay’s] project seems to be our deep and ongoing subjectivity, our vulnerability to history, to one another, to desire, and to the belief in something large and lasting that we might belong to. There’s empathy, play, and fearlessness here, and both formal and emotional range. The beauty of these poems is always married to a deep, implacable pang. Their consolation is always rooted in the unifying force of remembered loss.” —Whiting Award Judges
The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay’s lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.
About the Author
Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). For her work she was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. Her books have also been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cave Canem Foundation, among other foundations. Girmay is the author of the chapbook, and was a flower, made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica. Other recent collaborations include the picture books Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way with artist Diana Ejaita and What Do You Know? with artist Ariana Fields (both published with Enchanted Lion). Commissioned by the Authors Guild in collaboration with Tanglewood, Girmay is currently working on an experiment for the stage with director Dawn M. Simmons and musicians Ashleigh Gordon and Brittany J. Green.
Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and in 2025 completed her final year as Editor-at-Large for the Blessing the Boats Selections.