The Tunisian American poet Leila Chatti has joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From Spring 2021, she will resume as the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry. The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers creative writing programs at both graduate and undergraduate levels—in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and playwriting.
Leila Chatti was shortlisted for the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. 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. She was a 2017-2018 Fellow of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing.
Chatti’s debut full-length collection Deluge, out last year from Copper Canyon Press, “investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments.” Her “remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden.”
Chatti is also the author of the chapbooks Ebb, from the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets series, and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, a 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press.
