Grisel Yolanda Acosta

Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a professor at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Their poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh Books, 2021), was a 2020 finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), the creative writing editor at Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and a poetry editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ). 

Acosta’s work has been published in The Baffler; Red Fez; A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; Best American Poetry; Split This Rock; The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (edited by Gary Jackson, Len Lawson, and Cynthia Manick; Blair, 2021); Platform Review; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology (edited by Alex Hernandez, Matthew David Goodwin, and Sarah Rafael García; Mad Creek Books, 2021); Paterson Literary Review; The Acentos Review; Inkwell; and The Hopkins Review.

She has performed her work across continents and in multiple languages, including at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery as part of its 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions exhibit; the Poetry Foundation, as part of the Letras Latinas 20th Anniversary; and Lincoln Center’s Seen, Sound, Scribe series. They are the recipient of a Sundress Academy for the Arts grant and residency and an Arts, Letters, Numbers residency. They are also a Geraldine Dodge Foundation poet, a Macondo fellow, and a VONA alum. Her oral history and memoir work, titled First Spanish, has been funded by the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative via the Mellon Foundation. 

Acosta’s work is influenced by her Afro-Colombian and Cuban background, environmental justice, the punk and house music movements in her hometown of Chicago, Illinois, and her work in journalism, education, and Latinx literature.