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.
Poetry
Spring 2025
Language
All the words I know beautiful the world. Chatty, my teacher says. Miss Chatty! Says I don’t listen because I talk, but I talk because I listen. Everything I hear […]
Mar/Apr 2022
Prelapsarian
Before the rest of it, there was Adam and me—two oldest kids on the cul de sac on the outskirts of our Michigan town where nothing ever happened except our […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2022
The Reversal
A man who tries very hard to love me convinces me to leave, for the first time in days, my bed—to go outside to see the frozen lake. And, despite […]
Resistance, Change, Survival
On Fear in the Year of Trump
Three days after the election of the 45th president of the United States, my mother calls me. It is late and I am awake. I am in a tiny, top-floor […]
Jan/Feb 2018
Angel
After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says You deserve that which has happened to you. It says I see what you do with your long, terrene hands. […]