Creative on the rise!
Introducing Leila!
Leila Sade is an exceptionally talented and gifted poet, with remarkable passion and determination to make impactful strides in the world through her craft and this is very obvious in her zeal and consistency in the world of Literature, specifically poetry which speaks for itself. Her relatable and brilliant style of writing is exactly why Leila is now here on the most prestigious writers platform in the world.
Today, we take a foray into the world of Leila with excerpts below detailing her amazing story.
I have been writing poetry since I was five years old. I do not remember making a conscious decision to become a poet. I remember words simply being there, asking to be arranged. Long before I understood craft, publication, or what it meant to call myself a writer, poetry gave me a place to put what I noticed and what I felt.
I was born in New York City, the third of four children, to a Belizean father and a mother who is African American and Puerto Rican. Movement was part of my childhood almost from the beginning. My father served in the United States Navy, and his long deployments meant that absence was something our family learned to live around. We lived in Oakland, California, where my younger brother was born, and later in Virginia Beach, Virginia, before moving to Marietta, Georgia, in 1995. Marietta is where I grew up and eventually graduated from high school.
That same year, my father left active duty for the Navy Reserve and started a general contracting business. More than thirty years later, that business is still operating and thriving. I watched him build something from the ground up and continue showing up for it year after year. I did not have language for it then, but I think that example stayed with me: if something matters enough to create, it may also ask you to sustain it.
By the time we settled in Georgia, poetry was already a constant in my life. At thirteen, I assembled my first manuscript, a collection of poetry called From Where I Stand. The manuscript was copyrighted, and I had a traditional publishing deal for it. The book was never ultimately published, but even at that age I had already experienced the strange seriousness of gathering individual poems and realizing they belonged to something larger.
The title feels almost prophetic to me now. From Where I Stand. At thirteen, I could not have known how many different places life would ask me to stand, how many versions of myself I would become, or how often writing would be the way I understood the view.
High school was extraordinarily busy. I had a club, rehearsal, meeting, practice, or performance almost every day. I was inducted into the International Thespian Society and served as co-president of our chapter. Theater allowed me to work across nearly every part of a production. I acted, built sets, ran sound, worked front of house, wrote skits, and co-created and helped run a traveling performance troupe. I also initiated an anti-smoking Truth campaign at my school and served as its co-president.
Music was another language I was learning at the same time. I began band in sixth grade playing French horn, switched to trumpet in seventh grade, and continued through high school. I played trumpet in marching band, concert band, and jazz band while also singing and playing in church. At St. Jude Episcopal Church in Smyrna, Georgia, and later at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, music became part of my spiritual life as well as my creative one.
At St. Thomas, our choir formed a band that traveled throughout Georgia and surrounding states to perform at youth events. For several years, we were invited to perform at the Eucharistic Congress held by the Archdiocese of Atlanta, which was an enormous honor. We recorded an album called La Red, and I wrote my first recorded song, Más de Ti, which appeared on the album. The band would later open for Son by Four after the group moved away from secular music.
Looking back, I can see that I was learning the same lesson in different forms. A poem, a song, a stage, a trumpet, a story: I was always searching for the right vessel for whatever needed to come out.
Then I grew up. I became a mother, and eventually I followed a path that had shaped so much of my childhood and served in the United States Navy myself. Today I live in the Atlanta area and am a single mother of four: two sons and two daughters, now 23, 21, 17, and 15. They are not quite children anymore, which is its own strange threshold.
My adult life has not been linear. I am a domestic abuse survivor and a suicide survivor. I have also experienced devastating suicide loss within my family. Those experiences changed me, but I resist the idea that suffering automatically makes a person wiser or that trauma must be transformed into something beautiful in order to justify surviving it. Sometimes survival is simply survival. The meaning comes later, if it comes at all.
I am also neurodivergent. Autism, ADHD, and OCD shape the way I move through the world and, inevitably, the way I write. I notice patterns. I can remain with an idea long after other people may have set it down. I turn language over until it says what I actually mean. Contradictions interest me because human beings are full of them. I can love silence and resent it. I can grieve something and be grateful it ended. I can be afraid and still move forward. Poetry gives those truths enough room to exist beside one another without forcing one of them to disappear.
For much of my life, writing has felt less like a hobby than a biological imperative. There are things I understand only after I have written them. Poetry has allowed me to examine grief, love, loneliness, desire, motherhood, identity, trauma, spirituality, survival, and the strange distance between what happens to us and what we eventually understand about it.
I am deeply spiritual, and much of my life now is a search for peace, both within myself and around me. I am not especially interested in easy certainty. I am interested in truth. That distinction matters to my work. I do not want a poem to tell me that everything will be okay simply because the sentence is comforting. I want the poem to look directly at what is there and remain honest enough to say, This happened. This hurt. This was beautiful. This was mine. This was not mine. This is what I know from here.
That search for truth has expanded beyond poetry. I write and release music as Leila Sade, and I am currently working on five books: a poetry collection, a young-adult novel, two fantasy novels, and a work of philosophy. I am also the founder of My Story Archive, a public benefit corporation created around the preservation of people's lives, memories, and experiences in their own voices. The forms are different, but the impulse underneath them is remarkably consistent.
How do we leave evidence that we were here? How do we tell the truth about what it was like to be us?
Those questions sit beneath much of what I create. They are present when I write a poem about love, when I write a song, when I build a fictional world, and when I think about preserving the story of an ordinary life before its details disappear. I have come to believe that witness matters. Not only public witness, but the quieter act of witnessing ourselves accurately.
Poetry has been one of the primary ways I have learned to do that. It has not erased what happened to me, and I would never ask it to. It has helped me become more precise about what happened, what it meant, what belongs to me, and what I am finally allowed to put down. That precision has been part of my personal growth. I am less interested now in turning pain into proof of strength. I am more interested in understanding myself without requiring every wound to become a sacred heirloom.
Poetry has also taught me to stay curious about the person I am becoming. At forty-one, I am still capable of surprising myself. I still begin things. I still change my mind. I still search for peace. I still fall in love with language. I still believe there are truths I have not yet found the words for.
Perhaps that is what poetry means to me after all these years. It is not simply a record of my life. It is one of the ways I have remained in conversation with it.
The five-year-old wrote.
The thirteen-year-old gathered those poems into From Where I Stand.
And all these years later, I am still standing somewhere with a pen in my hand, trying to tell the truth from here.
