Aracelis Girmay on Reading Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton
In Conversation with Jordan Kisner on Thresholds
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places. Thresholds is a co-production between Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub
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In the penultimate episode of the series, Jordan sits down to talk with poet Aracelis Girmay about the way that reading—especially discovering the works of Toni Morrison as a teenager—changed her life.
“It was like suddenly this cosmology of Black feminist poets, elders, was—I began to reach for them. I feel like my world actually changed after that.”
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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). 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 the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud.
Thresholds
Thresholds is a series of intimate, surprising interviews with writers and artists you love about the transformative experiences (surprises, crises, existential freakouts, u-turns, breakthroughs) that have shaped their work. The life-wasn’t-the-same-after-that moments. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.
