Leslie Harrison

Leslie Harrison was born in Germany and raised in New Hampshire. She earned graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her first collection of poetry, Displacement (2009), won a Bakeless Prize. Her second book, The Book of Endings (2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Harrison’s poems have been described as meditative and searching. “They show us a mind in motion,” writes Matthew Thorburn in an interview with Harrison for Ploughshares, “questing and questioning, wrestling with complex feelings and ideas.”

Harrison is the recipient of both a scholarship and a fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The 2010 Philip Roth resident in poetry at Bucknell University, she has taught at Washington College and is currently an assistant professor at Towson University.