Chet'la (pronounced: SHAY-la) is the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020). She is currently working on her debut essay collection about her relationship to home, heritage, and belonging through domestic and international travel; it’s forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2025.

Raised in the Mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University.  For her work, Chet’la has received fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Hawthornden Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, wildness, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Account. Among her other publications, her poem “And the Record Repeats” appeared in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi & Dr. Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.

Chet’la has also collaborated with photographer Shannon Woodloe to create an exhibition in conversation with Mistress; prints for the show are available through the Delaware Art Museum’s gift shop.

She is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University. 

Photo courtesy of Mahsa Parvizi.