Nisha Atalie is a nonfiction writer and poet based in Chicago. She is originally from the Pacific Northwest. Atalie has written for Rampant Magazine and has published her poetry on sites like Volume Poetry and Poem-a-Day. 

Atalie’s poem “Do/Do Not,” published in 2022, was awarded third place in the Academy of American Poets’ Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize for its presentation of pollution and the climate crisis. Atalie read “Do/Do Not” at the Unbound Book Festival’s All Day Poetry event hosted by Top Ten Wines on April 20. 

Atalie received the Emerging Poet Award at this year’s Unbound Book Festival. The festival featured nationally and internationally recognized poets, who read their work. Along with poet readings, writing workshops were also held during the festival.

The Emerging Poet Award gives upcoming poets the opportunity to share their work.

A current literary studies doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Atalie’s family encouraged her to write from a young age. This allowed her to take creative liberties and risks with her work. 

“There’s no rules,” Atalie said. “There’s nobody who can tell you that something isn’t poetry. I love that — that freedom — and that ability to just experiment.” 

Atalie hopes to demonstrate this quality by communicating that the message of a work is more important than how conventionally it is structured. When it comes to the structure of Atalie’s poems, some follow a traditional pattern meter while others take a less traditional route. 

An example of this is her poem “Brown,” which contains a few words sprawled across the page in a unique, non-traditional manner. 

“come winter we mourn
              trees   leafless and empty
                      fields   dull
                                       and
                               brown”

“It’s important that we write the poems that we want to write, even when those poems aren’t necessarily the most popular poems,” Atalie said. 

Atalie’s upbringing in Portland, Oregon, led her to possess a keen sense of the importance of preserving nature. Atalie’s poem “Sprawl,” winner of the 2021 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize, contains natural imagery — something present through much of her work. Atalie read “An Animal Learning” at All Day Poetry. The poem uses harsh natural imagery as a call to respect nature as we will all eventually return to it. 

“A big theme of my work is trying to grapple with the climate crisis, push back against what’s happening to the Earth and also celebrate what we do have,” Atalie said. 

Another key element in much of Atalie’s work is fighting for social change, exploring her personal identity and more recently, the Israel-Hamas war. Atalie said poetry can portray these ideas of social change in a way no other mode of writing can. 

“I’m somebody that’s involved in activism,” Atalie said. “So I’m very influenced by what’s going on in the world, and I try to bring that into my work.”

One poem Atalie read at the All Day Poetry event, “The Fig Tree,” uses trees native to different places to describe her own feelings toward her cultural identity.

Atalie’s poetry is inspired by poets like Diane Di Prima and Mosab Abu Toha. Atalie said Toha, a poet from Gaza, is brilliant and has inspired some of her recent works.

Atalie is one of many poets given the opportunity to show their work at the Unbound Book Festival. 

Edited by Alex Goldstein | agoldstein@themaneater.com

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Edited by Sophie Rentschler | srentschler@themaneater.com