Adapted from its 2025 debut at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, and featuring new texts and projections, aracelis girmay’s “An Experiment in Voices” incorporates original writing, close readings, and sound to meditate on Black maternity and intergenerational imagination. Beginning with the life of her great-grandmother, who was born to Black farm laborers in Georgia around 1909 and later migrated to Chicago, girmay has created a hybrid, performative essay focused on the histories and sensibilities of her foremothers while also contending with familial legacies of loss and displacement. This piece, developed in collaboration with producer Bernard Schwartz, composer brittany j. green, and violist Ashleigh Gordon, as well as director of its staged reading Dawn M. Simmons, emerges from an extended study of works by caretakers, cultural workers, artists, and scholars that are, in girmay’s words, “attending to the imagination—and to lifemaking—in catastrophe.”
aracelis girmay is the author of four full-length poetry collections, including the recently published GREEN OF ALL HEADS (2025). She is also the editor of the anthologies How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (2023). Her writing has appeared in e-flux, Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Recent collaborations span performance, picture books, and a chapbook project with artist Valentina Améstica. She has received numerous honors, among them a Whiting Award (2015) and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (2025), and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2018). girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English at Stanford University, California. She lives in the East Bay, California.
Bernard Schwartz is a longtime producer of literary programs, including those at the 92nd Street Y and Authors Guild Foundation in New York, and regularly supports the commissioning of new work.
