Leslie Contreras Schwartz holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA in English from Rice University. Her poetry has appeared in Pebble Lake Review, Southern Women's Review, The Adirondack Review, "Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poe ts" by Mutabilis Press, and other publications, and her essays have appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Ozy, and Dame Magazine. Saint Julian Press will publish her first collection of poems, FUEGO, in March 2016.

Books by Leslie Contreras Schwartz:

Other poems on the web by Leslie Contreras Schwartz:
"Labor Pantoum"
"Postpartum"
"Lullaby for My Son After the Orlando Massacre"
"Cosmology"

Leslie Contreras Schwartz's Website.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz on Twitter.

About Fuego:

"Fuego is full of fire, of the passionate intensity of creation in the face of great odds— the intensity of difficult pregnancies and childbirth and all-consuming motherhood, of the immigrant student who struggles to write his first sentences in English, the child who falls from her bike and gets up again and again, the long-distance swimmer trying to swim to Antarctica, all of them stand-ins, I think, for the artist who struggles to make something meaningful from language in the midst of life, which is to say in the midst of death. This Leslie Contreras Schwartz has done in her debut collection, and hers is a distinctive and welcome new voice in American poetry."
—Susan Wood

'Leslie Contreras Schwartz's Fuego is filled with the power of things: floods that bring both destructive power and promise of new life, televisions that bring awful news, a small child's naming of clouds. Like Plath's most tender poems, Schwartz's debut collection uses the minutiae of everyday living to create a world where even in the darkest times, light finds a way to come "from under / the shade, / light from under / the door.'
—Amanda Auchter