Description

Leila Chatti, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize for Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), reads from her book.

Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Naomi Shihab Nye observes that “to write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge . . . Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the ‘flooding’ it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience.”

The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom. The in-person location will be James Branch Cabell Library, Room 303, 901 Park Ave., Richmond, Va. 23219. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks.

Please register to attend in person or online. For questions or accommodations, please contact the VCU Libraries Events Office at kimbrellgg@vcu.edu or (804) 828-0593.

Registration

Please register to attend in person or online.

About the Author

Leila Chatti is also author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018), as well as individual poems published in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and New England Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She has received numerous fellowships and scholarships, including ones from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, Key West Literary Seminar, Dickinson House and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. She is a Tunisian-American dual citizen, and she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.Buy the Book

Sponsors

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU's M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, VCU Libraries, Barnes & Noble @ VCU and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.

Image: Photo courtesy of Leila Chatti