Leila Chatti
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Pushcart Prize Winner & NEA Fellow!
Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in these coming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.
—Joy Harjo, winner of the Wallace Stevens Award |
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet & author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) & the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) & Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press.
Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund & the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, & fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, & Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing & Writing. She is the recipient of a 2021 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, & elsewhere. Twitter: @laypay Instagram: @laypay |
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Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere. —Naomi Shihab Nye |
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