Leila Alskaf

Leila Alskaf is currently a fourth-year undergraduate student at UCI majoring in English with a minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies. While she pursued Biology her first year and has a background focusing on volunteer work in the medical field, she decided to switch to English to pursue her passion for the Humanities and the Arts. She is a lover of spoken word, musicals, and acapella, as she took the place of Performance Director/Choreographer in an on-campus co-ed acapella group called “Uniting Voices,” where she received an award for Outstanding Choreography at ICCA’s (International Collegiate Competition for Acapella). Being a daughter of Middle Eastern decent, she has always been exposed to passionate prose and Arabic poets growing up, which have inspired a heightened sense of suspense, dramatization, and musicality within her style of writing. Her favorite writers are Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Richard Siken, Raymond Carver, and many more. Leila’s most current works of poetry put emphasis on topics such as mental health, broken love, dream worlds, and investigations towards the juxtaposition between sanity and insanity, as well as asking crucial questions like what it means to be both a woman and a dreamer.