From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.

Aracelis Girmay is originally from Santa Ana, California. She went *to school* at Cave Canem, Acentos, NYU, Community~Word Project, and Bar 13. Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and the black maria, and the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She has been awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and the Isabella Gardner Award (BOA Editions), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, Girmay's poetry and essays have been published in Granta, Black Renaissance Noire, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the NEA, and the Whiting Foundation.

Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks

If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 by Lucille Clifton, Ed. Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser

Elegies by Muriel Rukeyser

Break the Glass by Jean Valentine

The Star - Apple Kingdom by Derek Walcott

The Moving Target by W.S. Merwin

Look by Solmaz Sharif

Song of the Simple Truth by Julia de Burgos

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

In Mad Love And War by Joy Harjo

Songs in flight by Ingeborg Bachmann

Undersong by Audre Lorde

Poems of Nazim Hikmet translated by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk

The Collected Poems of June Jordan: Directed By Desire by June Jordan, Ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles