Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the 2019–2021 Houston Poet Laureate, and the author of the 2022 C&R Press Nonfiction Prize winner From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir. Her five collections of poetry include: Black Dove/Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 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 appears in The Paris Review, AGNI, EPOCH, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, [PANK], Verse Daily, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, and Houston Noir (Akashic Books), and The Best Small Fiction anthology, among others. Recent work is featured with the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. She has collaborated on or been commissioned for poetic projects with the City of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Contreras Schwartz is a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing and has taught creative nonfiction and poetry work-shops at Rice University and Stanford Continuing Studies. Contreras Schwartz is a Jewish writer born in Houston, Texas, with Mexican American and Mexican roots that extend back several generations in Houston and Texas.
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (May 21, 2026)
Also available on Kindle