Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate. She is the winner of the C&R Press 2022 Nonfiction Prize for From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), a finalist for 2020 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters; and Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, 2018), a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Catapult, EPOCH, Gulf Coast, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Zocalo Public Square, and the anthology Houston Noir (Akashic Books, 2019), as well as 2019 The Best Small Fiction anthology. Recent work has been featured with the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day and the Poetry Foundation. She has collaborated or been commissioned for community poetry projects with the Academy of American Poets, the City of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. Contreras Schwartz is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s MFA low-residency program in creative writing, and a lecturer in creative writing at Rice University. She is a graduate of The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and earned a bachelor’s at Rice University. For more on her work, visit lesliecschwartz.com.

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