Green of All Heads - Paperback

by Aracelis Girmay (Author)

Winner of the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Short-listed for the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize

Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural -- flowers, speech -- to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: "-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --" The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.

Author Biography

Aracelis Girmay is a Whiting Award-winning poet, editor, essayist, and educator at Stanford University. Her books have been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Connecticut Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. Girmay lives in Berkeley, CA.