Featured Writer: Margaret Kimball

On Thursday, September 21, at 7:30pm, Margaret Kimball, a visual artist and writer, will present on “Word and Image” as part of the Prout Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.

Kimball holds two MFAs, in visual communication and creative writing, both from the University of Arizona. Her first book, published in 2021, is a visual memoir titled And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir. In it, Kimball traces her family’s history, attempting to reconstruct events from her childhood and adolescence as she rewatches old family videos, interviews family members, and sifts through photographs, diary entries, legal documents, and medical forms. The book centers around mental illness, particularly how her mother’s illness shaped the childhoods of Kimball and her siblings. Throughout, Kimball grapples with the very nature of her project: the illusiveness of the past, the challenge of understanding others’ experiences, and the tensions of putting family secrets into writing. Near the end, she questions her desire to make narrative sense of events that exceed the structure of a linear story, reflecting that “Mental illness defies logic. That was and probably still is the limitation of my pattern-seeking brain, a mind that wants a clear story—point A to point B with narrative arc and all that.”

Kimball’s direct, thoughtfully crafted narration can stand on its own, but is perhaps best encountered in its intended form: a blending of text with beautiful black and white artwork. The pieces below, from a series on Kimball’s website titled “Diagrams for Self Improvement,” complement her reflections in the memoir on the non-linear nature of writing:

In spite of the seriousness of her subject, Kimball’s writing is sprinkled with humor, whether it’s the volume of thoughts impeding meditation, criticism of her childhood clothing and haircut, or commentary on her decision to alter reality a bit by rendering a duvet color in a more pleasing pattern or a cat in her preferred color.

In addition to her memoir, Kimball’s writing has been published in Creative Nonfiction, The Believer, LitHub, Ecotone, Black Warrior Review, South Loop Review, and elsewhere. She created a mural for the city of Cleveland in 2016, as well as a series of postcards. As an illustrator and hand letterer, she has produced work for a wide range of clients, including Verge, Smithsonian Magazine, Macy’s, Marks & Spencer, Boston Globe, Little, Brown, Simon & Schuster, Diageo, Ogilvy, and Random House. Her forthcoming memoir, A Brief History of My Affairs, will be published in 2025.

–Jane Wageman, Mid-American Review

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)