Featured Writer: Laura Walter

Laura Maylene Walter will read her work as part of the Prout Reading Series hosted by Bowling Green State University in Prout Chapel, January 26th, at 7:30pm.

Laura Maylene Walter is an author, editor, and BGSU alum currently based in Cleveland Ohio. She has been published in Poets & Writers, The Sun, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, and many more journals and publications. Her awards and recognitions are as numerous as her publication locales: a finalist in the Ohioana Book Awards, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, achieving fiction book of the month from UK Booksellers Association, etc. To add to her numerous accomplishments, the sheer volume of her pieces makes it impossible to include them all here. Most notably, she is the author of the short story collection “Living Arrangements” and has just debuted her first novel, Body of Stars published by Dutton. 

Walter’s early work explored dark themes, largely based on the death of her mother when she was twenty, “Even so, I often find myself returning to that period of my life, particularly when I write nonfiction. I think it’s because, as difficult as that time was for me, the darkness made it rich” (Kenyonreview). Her most recent piece Body of Stars is a speculative feminist piece that explores the future as it relates to bodies, “an exploration of fate and female agency in a world similar to our own” (Ohiocenterforthebook). The premise of this up-and-coming piece focuses on the placement of women’s moles being able to predict future events. What Book Riot calls “a story of devastation, rebuilding, grief, and hope,” Walker’s Body of Stars is a debut of terrific promise.

—Kennedy Lomont, MAR

Featured Writer: Leila Chatti

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, October 13th, poet Leila Chatti will read her work in Prout Chapel as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. 

Through her collection Deluge, Leila Chatti chronicles her experience with illness, uncontrollable bleeding referred to as “flooding,” surgery, and remission through explorations of narratives of religious punishment, womanhood, shame, and oscillations of doubt and faith. Fittingly, Chatti’s poems are preoccupied with the grand scope of existence, as we are suspended by our pain and grief between the infinities before birth and after death. “Indeed, one day I will return to God, as it is to Him that I belong.” she writes in her poem “Testimony,” continuing “Indeed, this was part of the Message and the Message was received. / I do not speak for God and He does not speak to me. / This an (arrangement/estrangement). / When asked my religion I answer surrender.” Despite their scope, Chatti roots these poems squarely in the body, allowing worldly pain to evidence the divine; in “Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s office,” she writes “In my hand, an empty cup. / Mary crosses / her legs, fingers the slender / chain around her neck. / She rubs her thumb against / the pendant’s tiny face, his miniature / arms permanently splayed.” Leila Chatti’s poems are as candid as they are intense, and as excruciating in their origins as they are compassionate at their hearts. You absolutely must pick up her work.

—Samuel Burt, MAR

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. Among her many achievements, she was selected as winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Chatti has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and more. Her debut full-length collection Deluge was published by Copper Canyon in 2020, and you can find her work in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives and teaches in the Midwest.

(Biographical info and poems courtesy of leilachatti dot com)