Leila Chatti
Photo courtesy of Copper Canyon Press
Bio
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from 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. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Provost Fellow. Her poems appear in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
For as chaotic a year as it’s been, I am frequently struck by its accompanying quiet. Inside my apartment, where I’ve waited out most of 2020, it is often so quiet I can hear the refrigerator’s hum, weather shift on the roof, and the children in the next building singing. There have been days I’ve not spoken a word aloud to any audience but my cat; when I do speak, most often I am speaking through a camera, otherwise alone in a room. Sound—and language—currently exist for me at an unfamiliar distance, and I am relearning my relationship to writing in this context.
I’m thinking about silence—what it means in a room, on a page, in a body, a life. Who is silenced, and how, and what’s on the other side of silence. My recent work has gone in two directions—one project fascinated with cacophony and profusion, and the others engaging wispy fragments, echoes, and writing the space around a subject unutterable. I am exploring the spectrum of language and silence in these projects, and able to continue this work with the generous support granted to me by the National Endowment of the Arts. I am deeply humbled and grateful for this gift, and to be included in a lineage that has done so much to lift voices.
The call itself was a break in this accustomed silence—I rarely experience the old pleasure of a telephone call. To receive this news this way—not on a screen, but through a voice—gave me great hope and comfort; I felt, after this isolation, again part of a larger human community. It gave me faith that we will again meet soon, and speak, and enjoy the briefer silences of listening and breathing and being. Thank you, for all of this.