About

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist.

She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo.

Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, 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 many others. 

Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010) and The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011). Her third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011), was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her fourth collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), was selected as a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.

Griffiths is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Her extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, and is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Griffiths was selected by the Poetry Society of America to curate the Poetry Walk, featuring the poetry of Octavio Paz, for the New York Botanical Garden's exhibit, Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first ever poetry issue of Oprah’s O Magazine. Her photography also appeared recently in Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q reboot. Recently, she partnered with Poetry Society of America and Blue Bottle Coffee for their Recollections blend campaign in fall 2021.

In 2020, she was selected as the 2020 Stella Adler Poet-in-Residence. Griffiths is also the image designer for the libretto, Castor & Patience, written by Tracy K. Smith and composer Gregory Spears, which will premiere in July 2022 at the Cincinnati Opera House.

Griffiths’ recent 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, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image award. Her forthcoming debut novel, Promise, will be published by Random House.

Currently, Griffiths lives in New York City.