B.A. Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and Honors College, 2011; M.F.A. North Carolina State University, 2015
Young Alumni Award: Presented to alumni age 40 or younger who have distinguished themselves through a high level of professional accomplishment early in their career.
She is an inspired writer, educator and a Spartan.
Leila Chatti is an acclaimed poet with numerous publications, awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize, and grants from the NEA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helen Wurlizter Foundation of New Mexico. She’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Tin House Writer’s Workshop, the Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, and Dickinson House. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and at Cleveland State University, she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her full-length collection, “Deluge,” was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. She is the winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award.
She served as the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing at Cleveland State University, as the provost graduate fellow in the creative writing Ph.D. program at the University of Cincinnati, and as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Chatti is Tunisian-American and has lived in the US, Tunisia and Southern France. She currently teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Pacific University and has returned to the University of Cincinnati as a provost fellow. As a mentor to young writers, Leila Chatti is a poet who represents the best of the Spartan spirit.
“My life passion is writing, but I also really love teaching. That's what I wanted to be, a real encourager of others and to help others the way that I had been helped by my teachers.”
Who will encourage others? Spartans Will.