Leeya Mehta

Leeya Mehta’s novel, Extinction, is forthcoming with Simon and Schuster, India. She is a prize-winning poet, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, & winner of an international publication award from the Atlanta Review. She is a fiction writer, podcaster and essayist, widely published in the US, India, UK, and Austria, including in the Times of India, Poetry London, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Red Hen Press’s Future Work. Her poetry chapbook A Story of the World Before the Fence “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history,” writes Tim Seibles. It was a Finalist for the 18th Annual Arts and Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry, a semi-Finalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition, Black Lawrence Press and received honorable mention with the Women of Resilience Chapbook Contest, Southern Collective. She graduated from Oxford on a Radhakrishnan scholarship, and Georgetown, and is currently the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University, where she was honored with Faculty Member of the Year (2025), and the Faculty Civic Excellence Award (2024). Mehta grew up in Mumbai. After travels to Japan and the Arctic borderlands, she spends time between Washington DC and India.