Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multigenre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the 2019–2021 Houston Poet Laureate. She is the author of the poetry collections Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters; Who Speaks for Us Here (Skull + Wind Press, 2020); Nightbloom & Cenote (Saint Julian Press, 2018), a semifinalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize; and Fuego (Saint Julian Press, 2016). Her lyrical memoir From the Womb of Sky and Earth (C&R Press, 2023) won the C&R Press 2022 Nonfiction Prize. 

Contreras Schwartz’s work has been published in AGNI, EPOCH, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Zócalo Public Square, the anthology Houston Noir (Akashic Books, 2019), and the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology. Her work has also been featured in the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-A-Day series. She has collaborated on and 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. 

She is a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s MFA 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 she earned a bachelor’s at Rice University.

A Jewish writer born in Houston, Texas, Contreras Schwartz has Mexican American and Mexican roots going back several generations in Houston and Texas.