Layla al-Akhyaliyya is a seventh-century Arabic poet who flourished during the rule of the early Umayyad caliphs. She is arguably the first, and certainly one of the very few, professional female court poets in early Arabic literary history. As a professional poet who sought royal patronage, Layla composed many panegyrics, including at least one polythematic qasida, a type of poem which is often translated as “heroic ode,” and which typically gives voice to a masculine perspective. In this domain, she rivalled her male counterparts, with whom she engaged in exchanges of obscene invectives. Aside from these two genres, namely praise and satire, she composed many elegies for her lover Tawba, a poet in his own right. Accounts of their love story and his adventures as a brigand provide a folkloric narrative framework for her elegiac compositions. In terms of the size of her poetic corpus and its position in the early Arabic canon, her status as a woman poet comes second only to al-Khansaʾ.