Upcoming Poets: February
Kazim Ali’s (left) new book “Sukun: New and Selected Poems” was published in the fall by Wesleyan Press. Ali’s work encompasses multiple genres, including poetry and cross-genre texts. His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light. After a career in public policy and organizing, he is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Leila Chatti (right) is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.