Leeya Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. She writes a column on the literary life, The Company We Keep and is an editor with Plume Poetry.

Her latest collection of poems is A Story of the World Before the Fence.

Leeya’s poetry explores the intimate space of the family and how it relates to the physical geography of cities and nature. Her first collection was The Towers of Silence. Leeya was born into a Parsi Zoroastrian family in Bombay. The Zoroastrian Parsis of India trace their descent in different waves from Persia over the last thousand years. There are about a hundred thousand Parsis remaining in the world.

Nurtured by her mother Avi’s theatre community, Leeya performed on stage and did radio through school and at St Xavier’s College, where poet Eunice de Souza mentored her. She spent much of her childhood living with her mother and maternal grandparents, Armaity and Sorab, whose apartment overlooked the Arabian Sea. Armaity wrote poetry and loved nature. Fresh fish from the sea made its way to her table, harvested by Koli fisherpeople who trace their ancestry back over 500 years to the shorelines she could see from her window. Her great muse, Bombay, was gifted in 1661 to Charles II of England as dowry for Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal.

Leeya spent two years at Oxford University receiving a Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) on a Radhakrishnan British Chevening Scholarship. When her mother moved to America, Leeya followed. She received a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown University and works at the World Bank in Washington DC. Now she lives beside the woods in America’s great aspirational Roman City, dominated by nature’s rhythms, with corridors of forest and two rivers. Owls hoot at night, foxes cross the road.

Leeya has won an international publication award from The Atlanta Review, with poems appearing in The Beloit Poetry Journal (Pushcart Prize nominee), Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Chandrabhagha, District Lit (Reader’s Choice Award), Poetry London and Vinyl, amongst others. A version of A story of the world before the fence was a semi-Finalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition and received honorable mention from the Women of Resilience Chapbook Contest, Southern Collective. Poems are forthcoming in a Red Hen Press anthology and with Penguin.

Leeya has been volunteering with literary, community & education organizations, from a Lit Lab in public schools, to the alumni board at Georgetown University. She serves on the board of The Inner Loop where she is a guest podcaster. She has hosted a reading series with The Writer’s Center as an editor-at-large with Plume Poetry.

Leeya is the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writer’s Center, a non-profit based in America’s capital region. She teaches contemporary world literature in the context of American and world culture and history at George Mason University, where the Center is part of the thriving academic community. The Center’s mission is developing a global community of writers, translators, and readers, curating public programs to deepen global civic engagement. It is a home for international writers and for American writers who face out into the world. By enriching public life through reading, writing, and translation, the Center actively pursues a just society.

This site was created under the stewardship of the brilliant John Johnson. He made the process so easy and fun. It’s so nice for a writer to have a space to reflect their sensibility and aesthetic. You can reach John at JJ@JCJJ.COM