LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ
LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ

Upcoming Readings

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. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Sweet Geometry (Kelsay Books, 2026); 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 has appeared in Paris Review, AGNI, EPOCH, Missouri Review, Iowa Review, [PANK], Verse Daily, Pleiades, Gulf Coast and 2019 The Best Small Fiction anthology, among others.

Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.

 
 

“In Sweet Geometry, Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes with such ferocity of the struggle with life-threatening illness, that these poems take on the tenor of myth, the largesse of cultural and personal history, the reinvention of landscape, and the vibration of the visionary. She reports from the present tense of the underworld of COVID-19—from the cosmic center of the battle to survive, fueled by her love of her children. ‘I would use a knife or a chisel to reach breath,’ she tells us, and indeed these poems fight their way toward mercy, and map the body’s “narrative of resistance.’ Written from her sickbed, from fever’s blazing epicenter, Contreras Schwartz has given us a crucial antidote to American denialism.”

—Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets, 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry


“The cosmos, the ongoing shift of selves, ancestral regions, undergrounds and over-grounds, sudden leaps, transitions and fractals of the body radiating through multiple figures. These are a few of the elements of Leslie’s poetic cosmos. There are hospital charts, COVID-19 data, Navajo remembrances, and life and deep journeys into the Mayan realm of the dead, Xibalba—yet there is an uncanny personal day-to-day life that is entangled to all dimensions of existence.

 

An intelligent, feverish, multi-lens of multi-lives threaded to the cosmos, yet fractured and sewn back into a second cosmos. A poetry of paradox and transformations, cultural frames, multi-worlds of the self. A most unique text and for sure—a ferocious groundbreaker.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus

Buy Sweet Geometry

FROM THE WOMB OF SKY AND EARTH, winner of the C&R Press Nonfiction Contest

Through intimate lyrical prose and fractured, nonlinear snapshots, From the Womb of Sky and Earth recounts a poet’s coming-of-age through a maze of abusive relationships and mental illness, woven through with glimmers of fierce love and ferocity. Punctuated by meditations on mythology and the Maya creation story, Contreras Schwartz examines the journey to hard-won autonomy, resilience, and self-discovery through motherhood.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s nonfiction debut is a book of witness that refuses to look away. As Contreras Schwartz’s stunning sentences wend their way around personal trauma and motherhood, structural racism and misogyny, bodies ill and bodies sexualized, and legendary death lords and misunderstood miracle workers, we as readers also can’t look away—it’s that magnetic, electric, incantatory. Time and again, these essays uncover the secret shared spaces between the corporeal and the ecstatic, that which we inherit, and that which we must tear down to start anew.  In lending such careful lyric attention to her subjects, Contreras Schwartz’s essays become re-dedications of the so-called ‘whole stories’ of our world.  This book is brilliant, beautiful, wrenching, and wholly badass.”
–Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

“From the Womb of Sky and Earth is a tremendous memoir, exploring everything in the world with brutal honesty: motherhood, childhood, violence, the body, trauma, friendship, power. With gorgeous, evocative prose, Leslie Contreras Schwartz shows how joy and darkness reside side by side. This book is an extraordinary, necessary work about pain and the complexity of survival, a work of exploration and witness; read it now.”
–Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, 2015 National Book Award finalist

“From the Womb of Sky and Earth is haunting and visceral. Contreras Schwartz wades into deeply personal water, drawing on cultural myths and histories to navigate recollections of harm and struggle. Through swells of memory, the prose reveals ways to do more than survive. From the Womb of Sky and Earth is about learning how not to be crushed by waves of indignity; how to preserve and exalt oneself.”
–Donald Quist, author of Harbors and To Those Bounded Donald Quist

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ABOUT BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA (FlowerSong Press, 2020):

In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.

“Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. “We’ve all cracked/in our own ways,” Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices—missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the “wild self choired, corralled in a thought box,” where “all of us together/can make a great sound,” a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz’s vision—that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.”

—DIANE SEUSS, AUTHOR OF frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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