Join us for the second installment of our Considering Craft Series featuring poet Leila Chatti and the Abecedarian.
It all begins within the alphabet—so we'll start there!
In this workshop, we will look at the origins of the abecedarian form as well as examples by contemporary poets, exploring what is possible in this seemingly simple formal structure. We'll also discuss the common challenges when writing an abecedarian, some strategies and best practices, and you will try your hand at some abecedarians of your own!
Meet Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and 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. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati.