Living Poetry
Graduate student recognized for connecting verse to 'everyday experiences and concerns'
Sumita Chakraborty 18PhD, who is studying English in Laney Graduate School, is a recipient of the 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dor-othy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship—one of the most prestigious awards offered to young US poets.
Chakraborty is one of five recipients of this year’s fellowship, which brings an award of $25,800. The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine select the winners, who must be between twenty-one and thirty-one years old.
Chakraborty’s work explores “how thinking about poetry as a mode of thought and feeling and looking at those modes that are connected to everyday experiences and concerns—arranging them differently, coming at them differently, and playing with them differently—can shed light and help us contend with contemporary realities,” she says.
Her work has appeared in Cultural Critique, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and POETRY, among others. She also is poetry editor of AGNI literary magazine and art editor of At Length.
