Grisel Y Acosta

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a full professor at the City University of New York(CUNY)-BCC. Their poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a 2020 finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and is available from Get Fresh Books. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), an anthology featuring over 30 scholarly and creative works by Latinas from throughout the United States. Their creative work is in The Baffler; Red Fez; Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; Best American Poetry; Split this Rock; The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; Platform Review; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology; In Full Color: A Collection of Stories by Women of Color; Love You Madly: Poems About Jazz; Nineteen Sixty Nine: An Ethnic Studies Journal; Voices de la Luna; MiPoesias; Pembroke Magazine; Private International Photo Review; ¡Tex! Magazine; the NAACP Image Award nominated Check the Rhyme; Chicago’s After Hours; The Reproductive Freedom Anthology; Basta!: 100 Latinas Write on Violence Against Women; The Lauryn Hill Reader; Paterson Literary Review, and American Studies Journal.  Her scholarly articles and essays can be found in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, African American Women’s Language, The Handbook of Latinos and Education, Western American Literature, Diálogo, Salon, English Kills Review, The Kenyon Review, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Oprah Daily, and Women's Media Center. She has work forthcoming in Inkwell Journal, The Hopkins Review, and How We Reclaim & Commemorate: An Anthology of Multilingual Poetry and Poetics.

Dr. Acosta received her Ph.D. in English—Latinx literature, from the University of Texas at San Antonio and has presented and published her creative and scholarly work in London, England; Cartagena, Colombia; Catalonia, Spain; Buenos Aires, Argentina, and throughout the United States.

They are a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, a VONA alum, and the Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Current projects include a Mellon Foundation/CUNY's Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative funded oral history collection on the Latinx population of Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, and the creation of a new PhD program at CUNY via the same funding. Dr. Acosta is the recipient of a grant and residency with Sundress Academy for the Arts, where she will work on her forthcoming collection of poetry, titled Wild. Future events for 2024 are scheduled at the Smithsonian, AWP, and with Letras Latinas and the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.