Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multimedia artist, poet, and novelist. Her collection of poetry and photography Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020) was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry and the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize. The book was also nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010); The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011); Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011), selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), selected as a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. 

In the video project P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), a series of intimate micro-interviews, Griffiths gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation and is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, the Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, The American Poetry Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, the Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, and others. Griffiths earned an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and Yaddo.