Faculty Civic Excellence Award

Leeya Mehta

Leeya Mehta grew up in Bombay, India. She has a master’s in philosophy, politics & economics from Oxford University where she attended on a Radhakrishnan Scholarship and a J.N. Tata Scholarship. After a fellowship in human rights at the United Nations University in Tokyo, Mehta moved to Washington D.C. where she received a master’s in public policy from Georgetown University. She spent most of the last decade working at the World Bank, first in climate change in Africa, and then as the primary evaluator for the bank's progress in meeting gender equality goals.

Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry collection A Story of the World Before the Fence “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history,” writes Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia. In 2022 her work was anthologized in the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Work, an anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press.

Mehta currently serves on the board of directors at The Inner Loop Lit. Her column on the international reading and writing life is The Company We Keep with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She is a guest podcaster with her new series, Writers with Pets in Solariums.

She is the director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center and teaches world literature at George Mason University.