Breakout Writers Series: Leila Chatti
About the Event
In her early twenties, poet Leila Chatti began bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this condition as flooding. In her debut poetry collection, Deluge, Chatti dissects the two-year struggle with treating the cause of this flooding–the religious images, the shame, the grief.
Spend a night with Chatti as she teaches us to use poetic forms to look directly at issues of faith, personal narratives, and conditions often hidden away.
Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.