Tuesday, March 12, 2019

“Hush: Writing the Quiet Poem”

Presented by Leila Chatti

In a time of seemingly endless bustle and noise, a quiet moment can be rare or too easily overlooked. In this workshop, we’ll turn the volume down and discuss how to notice and render the poetry of these “ordinary” moments. Using the work of masters such as Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, and Louise Glück, we will learn how to best use the tools of breath, space, syntax, and the line, and to recognize and communicate the power and beauty in what does not shout for attention, but quietly demands it.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar; 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 is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing.

Her poems have received awards from Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest, Narrative's 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, she was the first North African poet to be shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is the Consulting Poetry Editor for the Raleigh Review and her work appears in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.