The Reversal

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and four chapbooks. She is the winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in fall 2025. Chatti’s honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.