Leeya MehtaLeeya Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of The Towers of Silence and writes a popular column on the reading & writing life, The Company We Keep. Poems in A Story of the World Before the Fence have received n International Publication Award from the Atlanta Review; a Readers' Choice Award from District Lit; twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and a Finalist in the 18th Annual Arts and Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry. A version of the chapbook was a Semi-Finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition, Black Lawrence Press; and received honorable mention from the Women of Resilience Chapbook Contest, Southern Collective. 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. They first sought refuge in the tenth century A.D. in Udwada, and other sites on the western coast of India. 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. Leeya's poetry explores the intimate space of the family and how it relates to the physical geography of cities and nature. 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 Master's in Public Policy from Georgetown University and works at the World Bank. After travels in the Arctic borderlands and a fellowship in Human Rights in Japan, she lives in Washington DC, volunteering for numerous literary organizations as an editor, contest judge and on the board of the Inner Loop Lit. She has recently completed a novel, Extinction. Find her work at www.leeyamehta.com Read More Read Less