Denise Leto

Denise Leto (she/her) is a multidisciplinary poet, essayist, and poetry/dance dramaturge. Her ongoing project with Cid Pearlman and Mara Milam, home(Body), is a collaborative film/poetry/dance installation that premiered at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and was produced at the Cultural and Educational Centre Viimsi Artium in Viimsi, Estonia. Leto has been awarded fellowships in poetry by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Erice, Sicily and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and has won the Orlando Poetry Prize. Her cross-genre projects include disability culture work with the international art collective The Olimpias.

Leto’s poetry and prose have appeared in Writing the Self-Elegy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2023), Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Quarterly West, Jacket2, Orion, About Place, and with the Woodland Pattern Book Center. In 2011, Kenning Editions published Waveform, her chapbook collaboration with the poet Amber DiPietra.

Leto has presented her work at the New Orleans Poetry Festival and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, and she cocreated the San Francisco Baylands Poetry Project. She wrote the book of poetry for the collaborative dance performance Your Body is Not a Shark (North Beach Press, 2012) choreographed by Cid Pearlman and featuring principal cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.