Leila Chatti, Third Place winner in Narrative’s Eighteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is a Tunisian American poet and the author of the poetry collections Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize. She earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Cincinnati.



THIRD PLACE WINNER


Where I’m From

by Leila Chatti

All our fathers teach
at the university. They publish tomes
about pavement and gravity
and say things like holy
schist and find this very funny.
We collectively wear the correct collegiate
shade of green, Pantone 567, and glare
at anyone in primary colors on game day.

People on couch
To continue reading please sign in.
Join for free
Already a reader? Sign In