Aracelis Girmay was born and raised in Santa Ana, California. She received a BA from Connecticut College in 1999 and went on to earn an MFA in poetry from New York University. Girmay is the author of Green of All Heads (BOA Editions, 2025); the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), for which she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature; Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.