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.

She is the author of five collections of poetry: 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 Houston Noir (Akashic Books, 2019), and 2019 The Best Small Fiction anthology, among others. Recent work has been featured with the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She has collaborated 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.

Contreras Schwartz is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College's MFA low-residency program in creative writing, and is a creative nonfiction instructor for Stanford Continuing Studies Memoir Writing Certificate program.Contreras Schwartz is a Jewish writer, who was born in Houston, Texas, with Mexican American and Mexican roots going back several generations in Houston and Texas. She is a graduate of The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and earned a bachelor's at Rice University.

Leslie loves spending time with her family, lakes, kayaking, winter, and dogs of all kinds.