Chet'la (pronounced: SHAY-la) is the author of Blue Opening, forthcoming from Tin House in September 2025. She is also the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020). Her debut essay collection about her relationship to home, heritage, and belonging through domestic and international travel is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.

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 DC Commission for the Arts & Humanities, 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 Guernica, Lit Hub, The New Republic, Pleiades, Poetry International, The Yale Review. Among her other publications, her essays and poems have been anthologized in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi & Dr. Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World.

In addition to her individual practice, she has collaborated with several artists including photographer Shannon Woodloe, with whom she developed a poetry and photography exhibition in conversation with Mistress called 405.

Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program at Randolph College.

Photo credit: Shannon Woodloe.