The Sealey challenge has become a global poetic pilgrimage.
There’s no formal registration, no rigid structure, just a simple, radical act:
Read a poetry collection a day through the month of August.
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August arrives like a hearty and warm invitation. Each year, it asks me to take a break from the mundane grind of the everyday, turn towards my shelves, and make space for something slower, quieter, more contemplative and infinitely more powerful: a month of poetry, a month of absolute presence.
For me, the Sealey Challenge is not just about reading 31 books of poetry in 31 days, it’s about returning to the books of poetry, again and again, returning to the page as a listener, a student, and a poet searching for some kind of sweet renewal.
Started by Nicole Sealey in 2017, the Sealey challenge has become a global poetic pilgrimage. There’s no formal registration, no rigid structure, just a simple, radical act: read a poetry collection a day through the month of August. As someone who writes and reads poetry regularly, it’s easy to slip into routine, to revisit the familiar. But the Sealey Challenge shakes up my practice. It reminds me how vital it is to discover new and contemporary voices, to learn from forms outside my familiarity, and to listen—really deeply listen—to stories that challenge, awaken, and at the same time soften me.
A Celebration of BIPOC Poets
This year, I’m reading with a purpose: to center BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices in my Sealey challenge journey. Because poetry isn’t just what I love, it's how I understand the world. And reading BIPOC poets allows me to encounter myriad worlds I’ve never known, as well as echoes of my own.
In these voices, there is both mellow rhythm and fierce resistance. There is tenderness yet truth. They offer us not only new imagery and form, but new ways of being. This year, I am especially drawn to a conversation between the Indian poetic tradition I inherited and the contemporary diaspora writing across borders, from Bangalore to Boston, from Tamil Nadu to Texas. During this year’s #Sealeychallenge, I invite you to read the amazing poets and their collections curated below. I intend to read them again and again as their voices are ineffaceably poignant and stay with you as you read them.
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The Sealey Challenge is all about attention.
And what better way to spend that attention than listening
to the voices of BIPOC poets, voices that have always been here,
whispering truths we are only just beginning to hear more fully.
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My Indian Poetry Quintessential for the Sealey Challenge
Tishani Doshi
Some of her beautiful poetry collections to read: Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and A God at the Door.
Tishani Doshi’s work pulses with physicality and myth, given her background in dance. Whether she’s writing about violence against women or gods that linger at thresholds, her poetry is both searing and sensuous. Her voice always makes me realize that beauty and brutality can share the same line and sometimes, they must. The power in her poetry speaks out loud, the divine and the sensual together prevail in her ornate verses.
Arundhati Subramaniam
Her collection of poetry which is a must read: When God Is a Traveller.
Subramaniam writes with a spiritual lyricism that feels both ancient and startlingly modern. Her poems ask questions about faith, home, and love in a voice that feels like a whisper through temple corridors. Her verses explore topics like gender violence, faith and aging in a soft, molten way that touches the strings of the heart. The poems I love the most from her collection are those on Shakuntala, the ancient figure from Mahabharata. She portrays her in such modern colors and attributes, casting her as someone both ancient and relatable, living and contemporarily relevant.
Sampurna Chatterjee
I recommend one of her most famous books of poems, Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien.
Chatterjee’s vivid imagination and anamnesis really delights me. She takes the notion of the alien, both literally and metaphorically, and turns it into a lens for exploring identity, otherness, and postcolonial wonder. This book is a genre-bending gem and a classic anglophone work of speculative poetry.
Meena Kandasamy
Her book of poems Ms. Militancy is fierce, unapologetic, and formally adventurous. Kandasamy writes from a place of fire—from a zest of passionate ire protesting for freedom, emancipation and liberation. Her poems shatter patriarchy, casteism, and ableism, transforming rage into a sharp, lyrical force. Her verses are almost revolutionizing, revitalizing the mind like a clarion call to take action against societal injustices.
Kunjana Parashar
Kunjana’s debut book They Gather Around Me, the Animals won the Barbara Stevens Award for Poetry, judged by Diane Seuss. Her collection is a tender and surreal collection where the natural world becomes a proxy for desire, memory, and mourning. It is a wondrous and hauntingly beautiful read.
US-Based Contemporary BIPOC Voices I’m Excited To Read
Taylor Byas
Her debut collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a masterclass in voice and vulnerability. Rooted in Black girlhood, pop culture, and the streets of Chicago, her poetry is deeply personal and gloriously alive. I admire her ability to weave sonnet forms with contemporary lyric.
Gaia Rajan
Her chapbooks Moth Funerals and Killing It are sharp with longing. Her language is lush yet lucid—there’s real bite in her metaphors. She writes queer, diasporic, body-conscious poetry that lingers long after reading. It resonates with the heart and lives in the soul.
What the Sealey Challenge Offers Me as a Poet
Poetry, for me, has always been an act of collecting images, voices, silences, memories. But reading 31 books of poetry in 31 days feels like more than an act of collection; it feels like communion. Each book I read opens me up, line by line. Some days, I’m wrecked by a poem so deeply that I don’t want to read another. Other days, I crave for the next collection before I’ve closed the last one. I return to my own writing with the voices that I read, reverberating in my ear. I write differently because of them.
The Sealey Challenge is all about attention. And what better way to spend that attention than listening to the voices of BIPOC poets, voices that have always been here, whispering truths we are only just beginning to hear more fully.
This August, I invite you to read with me. Read Doshi. Read Rajan. Read Byas. Read Subramaniam. Read someone who makes you feel unfamiliar in the best way possible.
Let August be a divine pilgrimage. Let each poem be a step to the divine.
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Srijani Mitra is a writer from India with works published in magazines including Gaysi, North Dakota Quarterly and Chatauqua Journal. Her website is srupshapoetry.vercel.app.
Learn more about the Sealey Challenge at thesealeychallenge.com and follow along on Instragram, Facebook, and Twitter (X).